While I think Killis' tone is a bit brash, I agree with many of his points. Here are my thoughts on how to understand and address this problem.

1. Bolts are not really the problem. They are only a symptom of the problem. One social trail causes more damage to the resource than all the bolts in the entire resource combined. I hiked for years in popular rock climbing areas and never noticed the bolts until I started climbing myself. Even now, when I am looking for them, I sometimes wish I could see the bolts MORE easily.

2. The real problem is the trash, destruction of vegetation, graffiti, and human waste that accompanies a desirable destination. There are many reasons for a destination to be desirable. It might have a beautiful view, be an interesting geological formation, be close to water, be easily accessible from a road, or easily facility use from some user group such as rock climbers, bird watchers, or sky watchers. A highly bolted area just increases the likelihood for rock climbers to focus their use in a specific area. In the same way that a well conditioned trail increases the likelihood for hikers to focus their use in a specific area, or a nest of falcons increases bird watchers to focus their use in a specific area.

The worst abuses that I have experience at Red Rock include graffiti spray painted on the rock, white chalk clearly visible from 100s of yards away, trash, and trampled vegetation. Some of these abuses are caused by rock climbers, some by hikers, and some by people just wanting to party.

The BLM is focusing on bolts because they have to measure and control something. Bolts seem like an easy answer. You can count them, therefore you can control them. But I don’t think it will work. The resource is too large, and the user group is too varied. Red Rock is an international treasure. People come from all over the place, speaking all different languages, and having very different attitudes about what is “acceptable” and what is not. Saying that you can’t put a bolt in a given canyon because it exceeds some limit is some book on someone’s desk just isn’t going to work, and isn’t really the problem we are trying to solve.

The real solution is to either 1) Accept that there is going to be highly trafficked areas and reduce the impact to the resource in those areas, or 2) Reduce the amount of highly trafficked areas. Here are some suggestions about how to do this:

Reducing impact:

1. Educate. Most people want to do what is right. Signage explaining what it means to, “Leave no trace”, provides the right mindset.

2. Make it easy to leave no trace. Place waste disposal collection centers close to highly trafficked areas. Provide good signed trails to follow to all highly trafficked areas. If you do require a permit for creating a highly trafficked area, then also require that a signed trail be installed to the area.

3. Encourage activism. Give people their entrance fee back if they bring out a bag of trash. Give them a month/year pass if they participate in clean up days.

4. Enforcement. Monitor highly trafficked areas and make the law that if you are caught leaving a trace (trash, graffiti, vegetation destruction, white chalk, …) then the fine is that you need to do 40 hours of litter clean up in the resource. This enforcement would pay for itself.


Reducing highly trafficked areas:

1. Create more highly trafficked areas. This one is a bit counter intuitive, but it would work. There is a wall in my local climbing area that probably sees 100:1 ratio of usage compared to other walls in the same area. The reason is simple. It is easily approachable, has routes in all difficulty ranges, and is easily top roped. This problem has been recently mitigated by the development of new walls nearby. Now people spread out. If one place is crowded there are other options. People don’t like to cluster in line for hours waiting for one route when there is an OPTION to go somewhere else. For this reason, limiting bolting is the absolute wrong thing to do. If every wall in all of Red Rock was a great place to climb the impact would be so spread out that you would see very little impact. This also is one advantage that climbers have over other user groups. Climbers can easily create new inviting areas. It is much harder to force falcons to nest on every wall, or varied types of geology to appear in every canyon.

2. Make it difficult to access desirable areas. This is the opposite approach to creating highly trafficked areas. You make it so difficult to use the resource that most people stay home and play video games. Only those who really appreciate the resource are willing to make the effort to visit it. These are generally the type of people who are most responsive to education and care of the resource. At Red Rock this could be simply done by closing the loop road to all vehicle traffic except emergency, enforcement, and service vehicles. This also decreases the impact of the largest man made feature at Red Rock, the road. Less road kill, less erosion, fewer chemicals associated with its maintenance, less noise, and less visual blight. It is funny how no one ever talks about removing that.


Lee Jensen

I agree with Lee and Killis. Bolts do not impair the wilderness. As I climbed on the Angel Food Wall in Red Rock this past Saturday, I paid attention to the things that detracted from a wilderness experience. Granted, there are few bolts on Angel Food Wall, but even if there were many bolts, it wouldn't have mattered to me. Nor could it have mattered to any hikers below or to any wildlife. What I did notice was erosion caused by unplanned trails, trash spotted here and there, the shouts of other climbers on the wall, and the engine noise and horns from vehicles on the paved scenic loop road. Those are the impacts BLM and we climbers should be more concerned about. We can partner with the BLM to establish climber trails that don't contribute to erosion. We can pick up trash whenever we see it. We can join in graffiti removal activities like the one planned by the LVCLC for 25 Oct. We can carry two-way radios when we get on the big walls to cut down on the shouting. (Radios provide safer, more effective communications anyway.) BLM could keep the big noisy motorcycles off the loop road.

I agree that the bolts themselves do not really affect the "wildness" of a place. It is true that if you are not a climber you would probably never see them.

On the other hand what bolts bring is traffic. If you look at the most heavily bolted areas of RR you will also see the heaviest used clibmer areas as well. The wilderness, while having some bolts, is far less traveled in general mainly because of the lack of bolts. The one canyon that sticks out is black velvet which coincidentally has a proponderance of bolts.

So yes, wherever you have lots of people you are going to have the problems with trash, human waste, and the like. Though I am critical of the Vegas CLC they are trying to clean up these areas and give us as climbers a better name in that respect. If I was the BLM I would challenge climbers to clean up places like the black corridor and the Gallery. We would like to believe its the tourists that are trashing it but I think we all know that the tourists walk in and out while we camp out there for the day. If we were able to keep those places clean then they might be more inclined to open up the wilderness areas of the canyons.

The moratorium on bolts has not really affected me negatively and you could say has pushed me to greater success. I have put up close to 200 pitches of new climbing in RR over the last few years and have not put in a single bolt (this site has a few of the better ones). There are plenty more out there too. I have also seen other lines that would be pretty spectacular but would require a few bolts that would be nice to put up. While its been fun for me I know everyone isn't the same and some prefer putting up lines and climbing routes that require a bolt here and there. For this reason I hope that the wilderness will be opened up to some sort of bolting will be allowed in the future.

If you look at it from the BLM point of view they see: lots of bolts = lots of people = trash, erosion, loss of wildness. So they do not want areas that will attract lots of people in the wilderness areas. I hate to stereotype but in essence they don't want sport crags or prince of darkness type lines in the wilderness. That point is probably not negotiable with them.

What we are really fighting for is being able to put up an occasional mixed line and to be able to put in bolts for anchors even on a totally trad line. The BLM sees the ways to ensure that no "sport" routes go up is by having a bolt-per-pitch count. If you are going to put in less than 2 bolts per pitch then they say, "have fun, and don't bother us about that kind of stuff." If you are going to put in more they get nervous and want to make sure what you are doing is in line with what they want to happen.

I know there has been talk about knowing how many bolts it will take on a new pitch before you are up there. Well. . . if you get to a place where it looks like you'll need a bunch of bolts why don't you drill one and rap, get permission and then go back and put the rest of the line up. It will be a pain to do that but then again right now there are NO alternatives.

I don't have the answers but I see our choices now as either take this plan or go back to the drawing board. Oh, the last plan took years to get it to this point too. In the mean time I'll go on climbing.

I would be interested to know if anyone else that has privy to what the BLM wants has another opinion on these matters. It has been awhile since I was in on this and things might have changed.

As the one person here at the BLM that helps with climbing management here at Red Rock Canyon, I have been following this thread since the start.
It is interesting to me to see all the different views on what the BLM should be doing and how all the climbers out there can get involved. I would like to thank any climbers who have come out in the past and helped with graffiti removal, went to the wilderness plan meetings or commented on the plan, helped with ¼ inch bolt replacement, or any of the other projects that benefit Red Rock Canyon. For those of you who are not participating, I would challenge you that if you talk the talk then walk the walk. If you would like to help out by volunteering feel free to email me.

The reason I am writing today is to say that Karsten in his post has just summed up exactly why the BLM has written the wilderness plan the way they have. Karsten is right on.

I was surfing around and found this link on bolting controversies in Europe.

Various viewpoints and suggested solutions...

http://theuiaa.org/upload_area/files/1/to_bolt_or_not_to_be_>>>>>

Lee, I like people that agree with me. You're a fine chap.

It seems like something I said on this site actually spawned a turn in a positive direction.

Will wonders never cease?

For the record, I don't have a huge urge to climb Prince of Darkness, but I'll defend to the end Jorge&Joanne's right to put it up, just as much as anyone else has just as much right to chop it down if they deem it necessary (or feasable).

Good to see people focusing on what is *doable*, not their lofty armchair ideals. Good comments, lots of actual reasoning happening.

Thanks also to Jed for reminding us to put up or shut up (though he's more classy about it than I)-I'll see those who give a flying f- at the Make a Difference Day, I hope. Last year I was out there on a broken ankle, proving my shallowness, weak will, and lack of commitment to backing up what I say. Praise Jesus and circumcise the haters.