Fixed Anchors in Wilderness 101

YOUR TOPO TO THE MOST IMPORTANT CLIMBING POLICY ISSUES HEADING INTO 2024

Paul and Marni Robertson on “Moonlight Buttress” (5.12d), Zion National Park, Utah. Photo by AAC member Jeremiah Watt.

We know climbing policy can be complicated. That’s why we’re giving you the bite-sized answers you need about the key policy topic right now: fixed anchors in Wilderness. Dive in to get a concise understanding of the lay of the land: What is the PARC Act? What does the National Park Service and Forest Service have to say about fixed anchors and climbing? How does it relate to each other? What can climbers do to share their perspective on Wilderness climbing? We break it down and give you an opportunity to share your thoughts on fixed anchors in Wilderness Areas.

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The AAC and Nina Williams have been advocating for climbers in DC!

Hear from Nina Williams about what it was like to advocate for the climbing community, and what motivates her to take action and use her passion for climbing to make a difference.

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Take Action!

Share Your Voice on the Proposed Wilderness Fixed Anchor Guidelines

Photo by AAC member Andrew Burr. Scott Willson on the “East Buttress” (5.10b) of El Capitan, Yosemite National Park, California.

Durango Climbers Join Forces

A Cornerstone Conservation Grant Story

By Luke Mehall, Publisher of The Climbing Zine

& Taylor Luneau, AAC Policy Manager

This article originally appeared in Summit Register 005.

Grant Perdue feeling the water below on Close to the Edge, 5.11+ at Cascade Canyon. AAC member Will McKay

The Durango Climbers Coalition (DCC) started with a single issue: we wanted to secure a local beloved sport and ice climbing crag called Cascade Canyon. We had learned that the land—which contains challenging limestone sport climbing, our only local ice climbing, and a beautiful waterfall—was located on private property.

Cascade Canyon is home to one of the most aesthetic climbs in Southwestern Colorado: Close to the Edge. Climbers drop into the deep canyon before traversing under a wide collection of technical roof climbs until eventually reaching Cascade Creek, where the pumpy 11c emerges from the water. In the winter, climbers cross the frozen creek to a small but challenging group of ice pillars and mixed climbs. On the best days, you can lace up your ice boots for a few pitches of ice before crossing the river once more to round out your day with a couple rock routes, basking in the Coloradan sun. Few climbing areas offer such a bounty for the climbing community—no matter the season.

How could we secure this land for public use forever? This question led us down a rabbit hole of climbing activism.

Since then, we’ve realized that the Durango climbing community has several issues that need to be addressed, ranging from trail work needs to organizing cleanups of graffiti and trash. But for local climbing organizations like the DCC to successfully manage these kinds of concerns, they need ample resources. Enter our application for the American Alpine Club Cornerstone Conservation Grant.

As much as Cascade Canyon needs protection, some of our other local climbing areas need some love. Animas Mountain, which contains several different climbing zones, and is a mere five minutes from downtown Durango, is at the top of the list. Bouldering is the main attraction with hundreds of blocks scattered in a zone climbers call Sailing Hawks. On the opposite side of the mountain rests X-Rock, containing an assortment of introductory routes and home to Durango’s local sandstone tower, perched high above the Animas River Valley. Excellent running and mountain biking trails provide access to the mountain’s summit and some of the city’s most aesthetic viewpoints.

Anika Bach enjoying her climb up X-Rock in Durango, CO. Land of the Diné Bikéyah, Pueblos, and Ute peoples. Grumpyhighlander photography

Last year, X-Rock was vandalized with several hundred square feet of graffiti, which led to a mobilization of the climbing community to clean it up. We’d previously teamed up with the City of Durango to clean up graffiti at Sailing Hawks, so we had a little bit of experience. This incident sparked action and built community, and the DCC led the way. After eight hours of effort, we restored the sweeping red walls of this scenic climbing area with the help of 18 local climbers, city and county officials, and a Colorado Springs based non-profit, Keeping Colorado Beautiful.

The problems with X-Rock were not over after the cleanup. Irresponsible public lands users have been trashing the area, leaving behind used needles, other forms of trash, and in one case, a gun.

The need for the grant was clear. Trail work and signage would be crucial as we fight to keep this public land safe and sustainable for climbers and other nature lovers. The 5k grant from the AAC will significantly assist with this endeavor. We will formalize the area with a climbers’ kiosk, reinforce eroded approach trails, and direct new climbers to their day’s objective with additional tail signage. This effort would not be achievable without the AAC’s support, along with the City of Durango and La Plata County.

We’ve had some progress on assisting with securing future access to Cascade Canyon. At the same time, we’ve realized the need for the Durango Climbers Coalition as an organization. This need will outlast any current member, and we are here to do the good work, with a lot of help from our friends at the American Alpine Club!

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The Seed of a Story: A Conversation with Nina Williams

By Nina Williams, Professional Rock Climber and AAC Board Member

& Hannah Provost, AAC Content Manager

This article originally appeared in Summit Register 005.

Nina Williams enjoying Lizzard the Gizzard, 5.11d in the Cayman Islands. Land of the Taino people. AAC member Andrew Burr

Communication is key. It’s a trite saying in climbing, let alone most other realms of life. We’ve heard countless retellings of accidents that would have been avoided if a belay partner had been paying better attention or everyone had been on the same page about the intricacies of a descent. While the complexity of communicating about policies and advocacy initiatives is a little different than yelling “Off Belay,” the lessons we’ve learned about the importance of communication in climbing carry over to communicating as a climbing advocate.

Nina Williams, professional rock climber and AAC Board Member, believes that effective communication skills are the groundwork for all of our other advocacy skills.

In this issue of the Summit Register, we’ll introduce you to our Climbers Advocacy Network (CAN) volunteers and offer a look at the curriculum and skill sets our volunteers are learning in the CAN EDU program. These include skills such as becoming fluent in the value of outdoor recreation, identifying key partners for a campaign, building strong coalitions, and keeping advocacy sustainable. But throughout the articles that follow, there is an underlying thread: the power of transparent and meaningful communication.

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Beginnings

Nina’s personal experiences as a young climber set the stage for how important communication would become in her career as an athlete and advocate.

During her early years it was rare for Nina to see other women or people of color at the crag. As a biracial Chinese-American, she did not see herself or her story represented in the climbing community. Nina felt compelled to prove that she belonged. This mindset, while motivating in some ways, was also isolating and lonely.

Author Nina Williams, dancing on Flying
the Colors 5.11c, Sector Sea Horse, The Northeast Point, Cayman Brac, The Cayman Islands. Land of the Taino people. AAC member Andrew Burr

“As a young person, I was usually one of the only girls in the gym. It was always about keeping up with the boys. But as an adult, I started to see other women and hear the stories of other climbers of color and started to realize that I was not alone in this–there are people like me that are experiencing the same things. It created a sense of lightness. I didn’t feel so alone.”

The realization that came from the power of exposure and deeper feelings of community led Nina to believe that there is immense power in storytelling and making space for others’ stories. Ultimately, this experience guided her into the path of advocacy.

Nina was emphatic: “We need to speak up for those who feel they do not have a voice or a presence in the spaces where we climb.” And that includes the land and natural resources we are trying to protect and the surrounding communities that are likewise impacted by climate change and inequitable access.

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Communication as Space

Nina’s personal experiences with the transformative possibility of storytelling pulled her to pursue a degree in Communication. This background informs the powerful strategies she uses in advocacy settings to ensure that advocating doesn’t just become yelling into the void.

Nina explains that the traditional understanding of how we communicate is transactional: you say something with an intended message. Ideally the other person understands your intended message, processes it, and responds with their own message in kind. With this traditional understanding, the literal message being conveyed—the words themselves—is the only element under consideration when making meaning. This model views communication as a back-and-forth transmission of information. However, if you broaden your view of communication just slightly, you are much more likely to get your message across.

Bouldering at Rumbling Bald,
NC. Land of the Catawba, Eastern Cherokee, and Yuchi peoples. AAC member Forest Woodward

Nina argues that, by looking at communication with a wider lens, we can see the expansive and colorful spaces that exist within each person. These spaces are our life experiences, joys, biases, personal traumas, and more. One person’s space (i.e. everything they have lived through) is separate and unique from yours. This creates subtle differences in each individual’s communication styles. Communication is the process of navigating both the similarities and differences in each person’s space. Our spaces influence the way we speak, our body language, and how we communicate with others. Ignoring our own experiences, or the experiences of those we are speaking with, oversimplifies the many elements of our lives that infuse our ability to hear another’s message or to be compelled by it.

With this model of communication in mind, Nina recommends the following tips for communication that respects and acknowledges the complexities that each person brings to any given encounter.

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Nina’s Top 3 Tips for Effective Conversation

1. Acknowledge and Recognize Someone’s Life Experience (someone’s space):

+ You don’t have to agree with them, but once someone feels they are seen, they are more likely to relax their initial defensive barrier.

2. Validate and Affirm:

+ Find a common thread and validate the commonness between you. You can always find something that you share, and affirming this connection aligns you and the person you are speaking with.

3. Genuine Active Listening

+ Let someone tell their story and create their space for you. Listen without giving advice or offering your own opinion. Let go of your agenda for a moment and really hear what they care about and how their story gives insight into what motivates them.

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Build Your Personal Narrative

"Climbers are powerful storytellers just purely based on how powerful climbing is as a sport and as a community! There are so many parallels between the way we approach climbing and the ways we approach life," Nina says. Climbing is a part of your communication "space," but it is not a part of everyone's. Bridging that gap is imperative for articulating why you are motivated to advocate and why these issues matter.

When identifying storytelling opportunities that connect to climbing, Nina encourages people to look past the individual moves or grades and think about how the act of climbing is impacting their everyday life or their way of being.

"If I am describing how small the holds are, or how many pull-ups I am doing in the gym, or how I put a rope down to practice the top out, nonclimbers may not really get it."

Instead, Nina suggests we communicate how climbing is a vehicle for experiences and values that many of us share.

"For example, I might touch on the beauty of the landscape and how the process of climbing pushes me to learn more about things outside of climbing like human anatomy, new ways to calm the mind through meditation, or the Indigenous connection to a place."

These are more universal concepts that people, climbers and nonclimbers alike, can take away from the story and implement into their own life. In Nina's eyes, that is the key to storytelling, figuring out how to relate your experiences and what you learned throughout the experience to someone else.

"When storytelling, I like to think about the gift or the thing that is embedded within my story that someone else will take away and utilize in their own life. That is how you spread the seed of a story and give others the tools they need to build out their own story."

Stories that resonate can be the tipping point for action or inspiration for another climber to join with us in advocacy. They can open the way for an inclusive community and persuade lawmakers that these issues matters. So dig in—what's the seed of your story?

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AAC Advocates for LWCF in 2019

 The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) is our nation's premier conservation funding source for enhancing access to public lands, safeguarding watersheds and forests and supporting local outdoor recreation economies. Across the country, every county in every state benefits from LWCF. The climbing community is no different. LWCF supports climbing areas on federal lands--from Denali to Acadia National Park--as well as on state lands, from Hueco Tanks to Custer State Park. Unfortunately, LWCF expired on September 30, 2018 and the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition estimates that our National Parks have lost over $236 million dollars in conservation funding since the LWCF expired.[1] That means places like Rocky Mountain, Yosemite, and other National Parks and National Forests need to find funding elsewhere or put their conservation goals on hold.  

The American Alpine Club (AAC) values this conservation tool for the American people and passionately advocates for the permanent reauthorization and full funding of the LWCF. While we made great strides in 2018, the LWCF was not reauthorized due to Congress’s failed attempt to pass a public lands package which included the Emery County Public Lands Management Act, LWCF, and other important legislation. We are optimistic, however, that our active lobbying in D.C., our members’ participation in action alerts, and the hard work from the conservation community-especially the Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition- will result in reauthorization of LWCF in 2019 with the 116th Congress.

What is the LWCF and How Does it Work?

Congress enacted the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act (LWCF) in 1965 to help conserve, develop and ensure access to outdoor recreation facilities for the health and welfare of US citizens. The law sought to accomplish this goal by:

1. Providing money for land acquisition for outdoor recreation by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Forest Service

2. Matching funding for states on recreation planning, acquisition of recreational lands and waters and developing outdoor recreation facilities 

3. And funding other federal government conservation programs, like the Forest Legacy program of the Forest Service.

Congress authorized the LWCF for two 25-year periods and one 3-year period (starting in 2015) and approved the Fund to accrue up to $900 million annually.[2] The primary source of funding is derived from oil and gas leasing royalties on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). Unfortunately, less than half  ($18.4 billion) of the approved $40.0 billion in total revenues have been appropriated to the Conservation Fund since the Act was passed.[3] Those lost dollars go into the general fund and are allocated however Congress sees fit, instead of supporting the climbing areas we love. It is critical that we, as a conservation-minded community, demand the full funding of the LWCF annually in order to direct the greatest amount of financial backing towards outdoor recreation areas. 

The School Room Glacier on the Teton Crest Trail, Grand Teton National Park, WY. Photo Credit: Taylor Luneau

 Where Does the Funding Go?

Of the money that has been appropriated to LWCF since the program began, 61% went to federal land acquisition, 25% to state grant programs, and the remaining 14% to other purposes (Figure 1).[4] Federal land acquisitions are particularly important to the climbing community as 60% or more of climbing areas reside on federal public lands.[5] Frog Rock on Bozeman Pass in the Gallatin National Forest, MT was one such beneficiary of these resources. With a $2.6 million contribution from LWCF, funding from the Gallatin County Open Space Program, and a land donation, the Trust for Public Land protected over 2,000 acres of land to provide clear access to Frog Rock.[6] Before this, climbers’ only option was to illegally park on I-90 and bush-whack up to the crag. 

View fullsize

Figure 1: Land and Water Conservation Fund appropriations in Billions of dollars to Federal, State and other sources for the Fiscal Years of 1965 to 2018.

Other public lands will be supported by LWCF as well. Currently, 9.52 million acres of Western public lands sit entirely landlocked with no legal public entry.[7] These isolated parcels contain unique recreation resources and, if fully reauthorized, the LWCF will provide the necessary financial resources to unlock portions of these public lands. With the permanent reauthorization of the Conservation Fund, state and federal government officials can rely on the much-needed revenue for future projects. 

Political Support for the LWCF:

The return on these public land investments to local economies are well worth congress’ efforts. The Trust for Public Land found that for every $1 invested in federal land acquisition through LWCF, there is a $4 return in economic value.[8] That’s partially because the outdoor recreation economy, which generates $887 billion annually in consumer spending and 7.6 million American jobs, benefits directly from the conservation of these open spaces and outdoor recreation areas.[9] Elected officials have taken notice of this trend. Political leaders like Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Governor Jared Polis (D-CO) leveraged their support of  public land protection and outdoor recreation in their election bids.[10] Following his election victory, Sen. Tester joined Sens. Steve Daines (R. MT) and Cory Gardner (R-CO) in supporting the reauthorization of LWCF at a press conference at our nation's capital. Sen. Tester said that “reauthorizing the LWCF should be Congress’s top priority.”[11]

With other issues plaguing the end of the 2018 legislative agenda, public lands and their main conservation funding source fell by the wayside. We expect that our voices will be heard and LWCF will be prioritized in the next legislative session. Communities across the country will prosper from this decision for generations to come. As climbers, we can celebrate that our climbing landscapes will profit from this financial resource through the acquisition of new public lands, the securing of access to crags, and the conservation and development of important recreational resources. The AAC will continue to work with our elected officials and advocate for this critical conservation tool.

Data extrapolated from: Center for Western Priorities. “Funding America’s Conservation Future.” August, 2018. http://westernpriorities.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/LWCFReport_Aug_2018_final.pdf

[1]Land and Water Conservation Fund Coalition. “#SAVELWCF” Accessed Jan. 2019. https://www.lwcfcoalition.com

[2]Congressional Research Service. “Land and Water Conservation Fund: Overview, Funding History, and Issues.” August 17, 2018. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33531.html

[3]Congressional Research Service. “Land and Water Conservation Fund: Overview, Funding History, and Issues.” 

[4]Id.

[5]Access Fund. “This Land Is Our Land: Climbing on Public Lands” Vertical Times. Spring 2016. Vol. 105. https://www.accessfund.org/uploads/1645_AF_VT_Spring_vWebFinal2.pdf

[6]Outdoor Industry Association. “#ICanSeeLWCF From Montana.” Accessed December, 2018. https://outdoorindustry.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/LWCF-Exemplary-Projects-Montana-v3.pdf

[7]Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “Off Limits, But Within Reach. Unlocking the West’s Inaccessible Public Lands.” Accessed December, 2018. http://www.trcp.org/unlocking-public-lands/#!

[8]The Trust For Public Land. “Return On The Investment From The Land & Water Conservation Fund.” November, 2010. https://www.tpl.org/sites/default/files/cloud.tpl.org/pubs/benefits-LWCF-ROI%20Report-11-2010.pdf

[9]Outdoor Industry Association. “The Outdoor Recreation Economy.” 2017. https://outdoorindustry.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/OIA_RecEconomy_FINAL_Single.pdf

[10]  Aaron Weiss. “Winning Western candidates turned to pro-conservation messages in campaign ads.” Westwise. Nov. 19, 2018. https://medium.com/westwise/video-winning-western-candidates-turned-to-pro-conservation-messages-in-campaign-ads-8c241a6d6562?mc_cid=2542f31a80&mc_eid=702f6902aa

[11]Edward O’Brien & Nicky Ouellet. “Montana Lawmakers Push To Reauthorize LWCF Before Year’s End.” Montana Public Radio. Nov. 29, 2018. http://www.mtpr.org/post/montana-lawmakers-push-reauthorize-lwcf-years-end