Last week several major newspapers around the country ran an AP story that portrayed climbers in a highly unfavorable light. Below is the Access Fund’s rebuttal on behalf of the climbing community, which was circulated to the papers that ran the original article.

AP article: seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/travel/2003997479...

Access Fund Response:
Dear Editor,

This week an AP article titled “Rock Climbing’s Soaring Popularity Comes at a Cost” ran in your publication. The Access Fund, the national rock climbing advocacy organization, would like to correct several significant errors and omissions in the article.

The article depicts climbers as environmentally irresponsible, confrontational, abusive to animals, reckless, and damaging to Wilderness areas. Evidently, the writer does not understand climbers or the sport itself because the article makes gross generalizations based on factual inaccuracies and a few hand-picked examples that reinforce the writer’s bias.

In reality climbers are environmentally conscious, reasonable people who are drawn to the sport because of their love of adventure and the outdoors. Climbing has a long role in the conservation movement, and stands on the shoulders of environmentalists like John Muir and David Brower. Jesse McGahey, the Yosemite Ranger referenced in the article comments, “I don't know of any other user group in Yosemite that so consistently acts as part of the response to impacts to the resource, and helps us as land managers find answers to complicated access issues as they arise…”

Case in point, this fall at the Yosemite Facelift (an Access Fund Adopt-a-Crag event organized by the Yosemite Climbing Association and supported by the American Alpine Club) climbers cleaned up areas used by all park visitors and showed that climbers are in fact good stewards of the environment. Their work was not limited to climbing areas but included miles of roadway and trails, campsites, and pull-offs. The Yosemite Facelift drew nearly 3,000 volunteers who contributed over 18,000 labor hours and collected or recycled over 42,000 pounds of garbage.

A few other points of clarification:
•The article states “volunteers packed out 900 pounds of abandoned rope.” This was actually historic steel cable on Yosemite’s Half Dome rock formation that the National Park Service abandoned decades ago, not climbers.
•The article seems to confuse climbers with hikers, and solely blames climbers for trail erosion. Over 3.5 million people visit Yosemite annually, only a small fraction of whom are climbers.
•The article states that climbers are “violating federal wilderness [sic] regulations by drilling into the bare rock face with power tools.” Power drilling in Wilderness is not permitted, is very rarely conducted by climbers, and the Access Fund does not condone illegal activity.
•The article states that from 2004 to 2005 the number of US climbers grew from 7.5 to 9.2 million. The same study shows that the number of outings actually decreased substantially from 147 to 51 million between 2002 and 2005. This information was omitted from the article.
•The article implies that land managers have banned, restricted, and limited climbing activity in response to the growth of the sport. In fact, climbers and advocacy groups like the Access Fund work in cooperation with land managers to create proactive measures to conserve valued natural resources.

The non-climbing public deserves to know the facts about climbers and the sport of climbing, and climbers deserve to be fairly represented. We hope you’ll consider sharing a more objective, fact-based response to a story that was reported quite carelessly.

Sincerely,
The Access Fund

With Support From,
The American Alpine Club
American Mountain Guide Association