Can Economics Save Rock
Climbing Access in Wilderness Areas?
Lindsay Watkins
AEM 250
Term Paper
May 2, 2003
Since the early 20th century when only accomplished mountaineers dared to scale the vertical rock faces and cracks of America’s wilderness areas, the sport of rock climbing has seen a huge increase in popularity as equipment becomes safer, guide services and climbing gyms become more available, and the sport is glorified in the popular media. Today, rock climbing is available to just about anyone with reasonable physical strength, a sense of adventure, and a bit of extra cash. The 1994-1995 National Survey on Recreation and the Environment found that about 7.5 million Amercians aged 15 or older went rock climbing—about 3.7 percent of the total population—and in 1998, the University of New Mexico’s Institute for Public Policy estimated that as many as 21 million Americans could be considered potential rock climbers (Grijalva, 2002; Cordell et al., 1999).
Rock climbing can take on one of several forms, including traditional climbing (where climbers use removable equipment—“protection”—placed in cracks to establish anchors on the cliff for their ropes), sport climbing (where climbers attach their ropes to fixed anchor points bolted into the rock face) and bouldering (where climbers work through short sequences of holds close to the ground known as “problems” and use spotters and foam “crash pads” to protect them in case of a fall). Both traditional climbing and sport climbing involve “lead climbing” where one climber makes her way up the route placing protection or clipping the rope into existing bolts. A second climber, the belayer, holds the rope in a braking device at the bottom of the climb, and in case of a fall, the belayer uses the braking device and the last piece of protection or bolt acts as an anchor to catch the climber’s fall. Traditional climbing, sport climbing, and bouldering have all enjoyed popularity at a variety of sites—most in wilderness areas—across the United States. At many of these areas, even where traditional climbing is the predominant style, climbers have established fixed anchors—usually in the form of bolts with rings attached—at the tops of climbs to allow them to safely lower to the ground without having to leave any equipment in the rock. In the past several years, these anchors have become the source of a great deal of controversy within the climbing community and more importantly, within the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and National Park Service (NPS).
In 1997, Idaho’s Sawtooth Wilderness implemented a management plan that banned the use of fixed anchors, and a year later, the USFS passed a proposal to prohibit fixed anchors in all designated wilderness areas throughout the country (Galvin, 1998; Grijalva and Berrens, 2003). Both the Sawtooth Wilderness’ management plan and the USFS’ proposal are based on an interpretation of the Wilderness Act’s principle of no structures or installations in wilderness areas, and effectively treat climbing anchors as being similar to structures like roads and bridges, since safety devices like trail markers, handrails and stone steps along trails are permitted under the Act (Galvin, 1998; Grijalva and Berrens, 2003).
Climbers countered the proposal with the argument that the prohibition of fixed anchors essentially makes climbing in wilderness areas impossible, since without them there is no safe way to descend to the bottom of a route after climbing it. In addition, climbers argued that their fixed anchors were analogous to safety devices used on trails and should not be considered as “installations” under the Wilderness Act (Grijalva and Berrens, 2003). With the support from the Access Fund, the largest climbing advocacy group in the U.S., and outdoor retailers like REI, the climbing community ultimately was able to convince the USFS to institute a “negotiated rule-making process” that would give both climbers and land managers some say in creating a new fixed anchors policy, ultimately buying the climbing community time before losing access to some of the preeminent climbing areas in the country (Galvin, 1998).
Meanwhile, economists were taking an empirical approach to analyzing the impact that the USFS’ proposal would have. Although climbers do not have any inherent legal rights to climb on wilderness land, Grijalva and Berrens (2003) argue that they may have legal standing in the policy development process when the economic impacts of the proposed anchor ban are considered. According to Executive Orders 12291 and 12866, passed in 1981 and 1993 respectively, a group has legal standing in a decision making process, and therefore must be accounted for through a benefit-cost analysis, if a proposed regulation will have an impact of $100 million or more on any group of people (Grijalva and Berrens, 2003).
To establish whether the USFS proposal would be a major regulatory change (one with an impact greater than $100 million), several economists set out to put an economic value on the climbing access that would be lost if the ban were implemented. Recreational valuation is a relatively new part of environmental economics and has become increasingly important in natural resource planning over the last few years. The first attempts to establish an economic model for climbing demand used a variation of the travel-cost method to analyze the per-trip benefits of climbers visiting the Mohonk Preserve, a private preserve in New York (Shaw and Jakus, 1996). Since the travel-cost model shows demand at a single site over time, Grijalva chose a slightly different approach and used a random utility model, which shows how people choose from different sites for each climbing trip, in her attempts to analyze the economic losses to climbers that would occur if restrictions were imposed (Grijalva et al., 2002). Grijalva et al. (2002) surveyed 597 climbers about 12,952 trips to 60 different climbing areas across the United States. Climbers recorded details about trip lengths, locations, and costs (including lodging and travel expenses) and provided other information such as their preferred style of climbing, total leisure time versus work time, number of climbers in the household, and climbing ability.
Based on the climbers’ responses and the conservative estimate of seven million U.S. climbers, Grijalva and her colleagues used several variations on their model to obtain estimates of the total losses that would be suffered by the climbing community if the USFS regulations were imposed. Their estimates ranged from $92 million (with a 95% confidence interval of $45 million to $139 million) to $764 million, with only one estimate under $100 million.
Studies of the economic impacts of the USFS’ proposal to ban the use and installation of fixed anchors in wilderness areas seem to show that the economic impacts of a ban would be enough to constitute a major policy change, which would therefore require a full benefit-cost analysis before the ban could take effect. This benefit-cost analysis, however, would have to take into account all of the use and non-use benefits of the wilderness area associated with bolting, and could ultimately show that the benefits of banning fixed anchors in fact outweigh the costs, allowing the ban to become a policy. Still, the alternative—not conducting a benefit-cost analysis at all—is a scary one for climbers, who worry that if the USFS passes a ban on fixed anchors in wilderness arrears, the National Park Service may follow its lead and outlaw fixed anchors on National Park land as well. The NPS has in fact indicated that it would consider such a policy, which would effectively prevent climbing access on some of the United States’ most famous and most cherished climbs, such as “the Nose” and other routes on El Capitan and Half Dome at Yosemite (Grijalva et al., 2002).
The issue of fixed anchors at climbing sites in wilderness areas is a complicated one, only part of which can be thought about empirically. While the majority of the climbing community seems to oppose the proposed USFS ban, there is still controversy among climbers over the use of bolts in the wilderness or at all. In general, new technological developments in climbing have always been met with some opposition and questions about how new technology fits into the current system of climbing ethics, and bolts are no exception. Since sport climbing (which requires bolts) and traditional climbing (which does not require bolts except at the tops of climbs in the cases where natural anchors are not available) are drastically different in their techniques, required equipment, and climbing sites at which sport or “trad” climbs are available, many traditional climbers rarely climb sport routes and many sport climbers rarely climb traditional routes (Shuster et al., 2001)Because these two groups of climbers are fairly separated, attitudes on bolting and climbing area management tend to differ; in general, traditional climbers favor more discretion over where and when to bolt and are more open to climbing management plans than sport climbers are (Shuster et al., 2001). Opinions differ so much that some climbers simply will not clip bolts, and in some cases “bolt wars” have actually occurred at some climbing areas, where climbing “purists” have removed bolts placed by sport climbers.
Such a wide range of opinions within the climbing community, coupled with land managers and management plans that may not account for the complexity of the sport and the wide variation in opinions of its participants may make it difficult to reach a consensus on banning fixed anchors in wilderness areas despite economic analyses that seem to show all of the costs and benefits of a proposed climbing management plan. Ultimately though, economics may favor the climbing community since the USFS would likely otherwise go ahead with the ban without any consideration of the costs and benefits of doing otherwise. Climbing advocacy groups like the Access Fund are taking advantage of a more empirical view of climbing to gain support from the climbing community for increased funding for research on the ecological impacts of climbing, studies that may in turn benefit the climbing community if benefit-cost analyses are carried out.
In the long run, it seems that the best solution for determining where and when fixed anchors should be used in the wilderness could be reached by conducting benefit-cost analyses that account for both market and non-market values on a case by case basis at each climbing area. In addition to the economic analysis, however, climbers and land managers should be actively involved in the decision making process, with plenty of opportunities for both sides to express their views. Under these conditions, it seems likely that a compromise could be found that would allow climbing to continue at some of the U.S.’s premier destinations without damaging the wilderness character of the area.
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