For those of you more interested in Wilderness than wildfire management details, DOI is having a public comment period on creating a standard approach to recreational rock-climbing across designated landscape areas.
I found it in Bloomberg Government, which didn’t cover the news itself in the part I can read (five lines) but covers that Senate Democrats are “worried t worried the Trump administration will use a review of federal wilderness areas to roll back protections on public lands and undermine congressional authority to make future designations.” The headline is “Interior Review of Wilderness Triggers Public Land Concerns“..
Whether they have a reason to worry or not is paywalled.. so let’s look for ourselves.
Conceivably (and I’m not a lawyer) Congress has the ability to say whatever it wants in Wilderness designations, even future ones. But I’m sure the staff has excellent legal counsel, so maybe someone can explain how Congressional authority can be undermined by rock climbing regs.. if Congress doesn’t like them after the fact, there’s a solution.
Here’s a link to The Horse’s Mouth. It says that they are seeking public comment:
The Department is seeking public input on two important efforts: First, establishing a consistent approach to recreational rock climbing management across designated wilderness areas and second, evaluating whether existing wilderness study areas and lands with wilderness characteristics policies should be updated, clarified or revised to improve management and use of some of America’s most treasured landscapes.
Together, these efforts support the Department’s commitment to expanding access to outdoor recreation while ensuring public lands remain well managed, accessible and preserved for future generations.
So, rock-climbing and WSAs (and lands with wilderness characteristics). But not anything other than rock-climbing in Wilderness.
Hmm. if we go down to the agencies, it appears that the public comment period is related to Congress requiring Interior to issue guidance via Section 122 of the Explore Act. But this Facebook post by the Access Fund says it was the PARC Act. So Interior is doing what’s required by Congress, and Senate Democrats are worried that doing what Congress requires will undermine Congressional authority. The Access Fund also said that the FS would be issuing their draft national guidance.
The draft climbing guidance released earlier today from NPS, BLM and FWS is a result of the Protecting America’s Rock Climbing (PARC) Act. This law was passed in January 2025 to override the 2023 proposals to prohibit fixed anchors in NPS and USFS Wilderness. With the passage of PARC Act, Congress was able to permanently protect over 50,000 threatened climbing routes including all the climbing on El Cap, The Diamond and countless world class climbing areas in America.
Now I’m not a fan of moving the FS to Int, but it does seem to me that some policies could be intentionally harmonized.. like this one.
What’s interesting to me about the news story is that it focuses on the reaction, which can be totally different from what’s actually in the notice.
So let’s see who else is weighing in..
Ah, the Idaho Mountain Express says…
Wilderness in Idaho, the West is subject to review by Trump administration, Wilderness Society says
Public has until Aug. 14 to comment on review of wilderness management policies undertaken by U.S. Department of Interior
Carroll, from the Wilderness Society, said he is concerned the review and changes will go farther.
“The review of those policies seems very open-ended, but it includes language we have already seen very clearly from this administration when it wants to eliminate policies, rollback protection or outright eliminate designations. By that I mean ‘streamlining,’ ‘removing barriers’ and ‘looking for efficiencies in management.’”
Carroll encouraged Idahoans to make public comments that support keeping public lands public and oppose rolling back protections and policies governing wilderness areas.
It’s interesting how this story elides Wilderness and WSAs.
Michael Carroll, BLM campaign director with the Wilderness Society, said current wilderness policies prevent development, oil and gas drilling and motorized use in wilderness areas. They also preserve the natural and primitive qualities of wilderness land. Carroll also said the existing policies and management practices provide clarity for outfitters and guides, agriculture users who graze animals in wilderness areas and the public at large.
“They are dependent on management by federal land management agencies that is outlined in all those policies the current administration is reviewing and potentially rolling back,” Carroll said in a phone interview. “Without those management practices in place, or with significant rollback of those management policies, you could see wilderness across the West be under threat from potential development, potential road building and the potential handing over to the private sector.”
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It sounds like TWS is worried about the WSA part, but not so much about the climbing part. Others probably know more.
There’s not much that will change with actual Wilderness under this review except allowing rock climbing as Congress ordered. What Wilderness groups are actually scared of is relaxing the Non-impairment Standard for WSAs to provide more flexibility for existing roads to remain open, and that the BLM might stop treating lands simply inventoried for wilderness characteristics as de facto wilderness mandating closing roads. The motorized community has been asking for those reforms for a while and things are looking promising for us on that front.
Given that WSAs were meant to be a temporary transitional state and have ended up being perpetual limbo instead, it makes little sense to continue managing them with the goal of achieving formal Wilderness designation that is never coming, while demanding that existing conflicting uses like roads remain in the exact same state as in the 1970s decades later. And lands with wilderness characteristics have evolved into another form of administrative wilderness designation which the Wilderness Act expressly had the goal of ending. The BLM can manage areas to preserve existing wilderness characteristics without managing them as de facto wilderness and kicking out existing uses to create new wilderness characteristics, which is what they have been doing even in areas where the RMP explicitly decided NOT to manage them for wilderness characteristics. Reform is badly needed in this area, and the wilderness groups are rightly scared it will take away a lot of their power to create de facto wilderness without Congressional approval.
Thanks, Patrick! It reminds me of working on Roadless, certain individuals (not our TWS friends) would claim that timber harvests ruined Roadlessness, but wanted to expand boundaries to incorporate… previously harvested areas. 🙂
FWIW: Here is Wilderness Watch’s action alert.
The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) is seeking public comment on proposed guidance for recreational rock climbing in our national parks, national wildlife refuges, and BLM-administered public lands, including guidance required by the EXPLORE Act for climbing in Wilderness.
You may recall that the U.S. Forest Service recently proposed guidance for recreational climbing on our national forests. Thank you to everyone who commented during that comment period. Now, we need you to speak up again—by August 14—to defend the Wilderness Act and America’s National Wilderness Preservation System!
Wilderness and wildlife are under relentless pressures at this moment in history, including from exploding demand for outdoor recreation. Natural limits are essential to protecting Wilderness.
Some background information:
The PARC Act, incorporated into the EXPLORE Act—which was signed into law on January 4, 2025—is a messy piece of legislation that attempted a de facto amendment of the Wilderness Act to benefit the recreational climbing industry.
The Wilderness Act is straight-forward—installations, including permanent fixed climbing anchors, are prohibited unless absolutely necessary to meet the minimum requirements for administering Wilderness.
But the PARC Act/EXPLORE Act says that permanent recreational bolting is an appropriate use in Wilderness when undertaken in compliance with the Wilderness Act—a wild exercise in circular reasoning—and now the agencies are tasked with making sense of the absurd in their new climbing directives.
While some of the language in the proposed DOI guidance is good, the guidance is undermined by a few serious flaws.
First, the guidance attributes DOI’s strained legal interpretation of fixed anchors to the Wilderness Act when it should be attributed to the PARC Act/EXPLORE Act. The guidance also casts DOI’s wilderness preservation obligations under the Wilderness Act as discretionary rather than required. Furthermore, the guidance suggests that only certain fixed anchors are allowable, but provides little to no guidance on the scope, function, and placement of such allowable anchors, nor does it make the development of climbing management plans mandatory.
Any implication that the Wilderness Act’s prohibitions can be overcome by the desire to enhance recreation is not only flawed, but also ushers wilderness administration to the precarious edge of a slippery slope. Wilderness administering agencies are facing a crossroads. The outdoor recreation industry, and its influence on public land management, is booming, and outdoor recreation pressures that were once front-country issues are pushing steadily into our most protected places. Meanwhile, agency wilderness programs are underfunded and deprioritized, wilderness-trained staff are stretched thin, and wilderness departments are increasingly subsumed by recreation departments.
Combine these issues with decades of agency equivocation over permanent fixed climbing anchors in Wilderness, and you have the untenable situation at hand: exploding demand for developed recreational climbing, proposed agency guidance that confuses statutory language on prohibitions in Wilderness, and wilderness staff lacking resources to effectively protect Wilderness.
In this context, we need defenders of the Wilderness Act and America’s National Wilderness Preservation System to take action!
The three agencies within the DOI are accepting public comments through this Friday, August 14. We know it’s cumbersome, but comments must be submitted individually to each agency via the following links:
National Park Service: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/NPS-2026-0101-0001
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FWS-HQ-NWRS-2026-1618-0001
Bureau of Land Management: https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/BLM-2026-0034-0001
Please speak in your own words, but make the following points:
DOI must acknowledge its overriding statutory duty to preserve wilderness character: Make clear that DOI still has an overriding statutory duty under the Wilderness Act to preserve wilderness character and ensure recreational activities—whether they involve generally prohibited activities or not—are administered in a manner that keeps wilderness preservation primary.
DOI must mandate pre-authorization climbing management plans: Require the formal completion and approval of a Climbing Management Plan prior to authorizing anchor placement, replacement, or maintenance within any Wilderness.
DOI must establish baseline route inventories: Mandate a public inventory of all established climbing routes existing prior to January 4, 2025. Enforce a strict policy prohibition against establishing new climbing routes requiring fixed anchors within designated Wilderness.
DOI must prohibit non-anchor infrastructure: Enforce a ban on secondary climbing infrastructure, including fixed ropes, ladders, permanent cables, and slacklines, maintaining their classification as prohibited installations under Section 4(c).
DOI must prohibit use of motorized drills: Any use of motorized drill to place fixed anchors in Wilderness should be unequivocally prohibited as it constitutes a violation of Section 4(c) of the Wilderness Act.