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Over the years, the Park Service and rock climbers have clashed over issues of preservation and access, but they’re beginning to find common ground.

As campers prepare their morning coffee deep within the shadows of Yosemite Valley, rock climbers thousands of feet above them carefully double-check their equipment as they continue their ascents—fingers jammed into cracks, rock shoes searching for purchase, inching ever upward. Elsewhere, as Native Americans make their way to the base of Devils Tower National Monument to worship, climbers rappel down the sides of the popular Wyoming monolith. Meanwhile, in California’s Joshua Tree National Park, small groups of climbers test their mettle and stamina on countless rounded boulders, eventually succumbing to the power of gravity’s relentless pull. The desire to climb a mountain or scale a rockface predates the creation of national parks. Clashes between climbing and conservation have left wounds on the rocks and in the communities surrounding them. For the most part, years of effort on both sides are healing the scars—and revealing common ground. Joshua Tree National Park is the world’s premier winter climbing area. On weekends in the cooler months, the campgrounds host climbers from around the globe, many of whom return year after year. More than 8,000 designated climbing routes meander up more than 100 rock formations, not including the bouldering options on nearly every solid surface. Routes range from those requiring no technical skill— basically hikes, known as “walk ups”—to the highly technical routes that only the world’s best climbers can master. Climbers can attempt longer routes at Saddle and Echo Rocks, for example, try a few bolted-face routes in the Astrodomes and in the “real” Hidden Valley, then complete a busy day by inching up Joshua Tree’s famous, countless cracks.

As climbers slowly creep up the rough rock surfaces using their own power—ropes, harnesses, and carabiners generally do not aid in ascent but simply lessen the chance of a catastrophic fall—casual observers may think these sinewy creatures are a rare breed of animal who defy the laws of gravity and common sense. But a 2004 visitor use study, commissioned by the National Park Service, reveals that it is not merely a rebellious, self-destructive few who brave Joshua Tree’s crags. Thirty-three percent of the park’s 1.25 million annual visitors say they climb or scramble along boulders, either as part of their hikes or as a main activity. Another 10 percent visit as technical climbers—putting climbers in higher concentration than the park’s backpackers and mountain bikers combined.

When maverick climbers first started putting up routes in the park in the ’70s, the sport was so far outside the mainstream that no one worried much about the bolts climbers drilled into the rocks. But when 429,000 acres of the park—more than 75 percent of its land mass at the time—officially became wilderness in 1976, the Park Service began to examine the effects of climbing, bolting foremost among them.

The damage the Park Service expected to find throughout Joshua Tree proved to be overestimated when a climbing ranger eventually counted the silver dollar-sized bolts, which can be difficult to spot among the rocks’ natural features. To this day, rangers maintain that other impacts are hard to attribute to climbers. Chalking can be difficult to see on the park’s light-colored rocks, and the proliferation of unsightly and ecologically damaging social trails could just as easily come from boulderers and hikers as technical climbers. Still, mistrust persisted between rangers who didn’t climb and climbers who tended to dismiss government agencies as unduly controlling and invasive.

Tensions mounted into the 1990s, leading to the formation of climber-advocacy groups like the Access Fund on the one hand, and restrictive actions by the Park Service on the other, including a 1998 ban on placing bolts in wilderness areas throughout the national parks. That ban was later overturned.

Around the same time, rangers began to understand that relations with climbers needed to change. At Joshua Tree, then-Superintendent Ernie Quintana, under pressure from the climbers’ grassroots backlash, called several public meetings and kick-started a dialogue.

“It took a while for those discussions to evolve from loud, angry discussions to reasoned, productive ones,” recalls Phil Spinelli, a climber and director of the nonprofit group Friends of Joshua Tree. He says that positive spirit has since become entrenched in relationships between rangers and climbers: “Before things reached the crisis level, we were able to work out solutions.”

The park has organized education campaigns around climber impacts with the help of an affiliation of climbers and conservation groups, including NPCA. The Joshua Tree Climbing Management Group has helped erect fencing around parking lots to direct users—including climbers—to the main trails. Travel on secondary or social trails has been discouraged with a technique called vertical mulching—the placement of dead brush and other natural obstacles. Signs encourage climbers to stay on the main access trails and remove chalk from holds whenever possible.

“So far the results are very impressive,” Spinelli says, adding that the efforts have been under way for two years. “We’ve found that once climbers know how to reduce impacts, they will. We’ve found a very high level of compliance.”

“Most climbers are trying to work as hard as they can to keep the environment clean and safe,” says climber Michael Watson, “so that we’ll always have it, so that access won’t get shut down.”

Meanwhile, new challenges have emerged. Rock gym-trained boulderers are venturing into the parks in droves, and bringing their own brand of impacts. Upstart efforts like the Boulder Project, initiated by the Access Fund, and a southern California-based education campaign called Boulder Clean are aimed at addressing that group by asking boulderers to limit group sizes, stay on main trails, brush off their chalk, and avoid laying crash pads on vegetation, among other courtesies.

In many ways climbers are no different from other groups gaining access to the parks: Snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Jet-skis in the Everglades are well-known examples. But no one denies that historically, climbers have always been a breed apart.

Much of the climbing culture was born in Yosemite National Park, the first site of big-wall climbing in America and home to classic climbing areas such as the nearly 3,000-foot face of El Capitan. And for some climbers there, the Park Service remains a perceived obstacle to their enjoyment of places where their ilk once roamed without any rules at all.

Bill Leventhal, for example, a veteran of 27 successful ascents of El Cap, thinks that by simply showing up at Camp 4—the famous campground from which climbers traditionally launch their vertical ascents—some climbers are subjected to unwarranted scrutiny by rangers. And he complains that conditions at the camp are less than ideal, a perception that few would debate.

Linda McMillan was 35 when she started climbing at Yosemite 20 years ago and says she “skipped that whole stage of feeling persecuted.” She learned from veteran climbers and gravitated toward the organizational side of things. She has served as vice president of the American Alpine Club (AAC) and remains a member. A nonprofit group that formed in 1902 for the study and enjoyment of the country’s mountains, AAC is also the parent organization of the Access Fund.

“When I started, the climbers definitely tried to stay in the shadows,” she says. “They’d skulk around and break the rules and try to stay as long as they could.” But the park’s surging popularity means that such behaviors can no longer be overlooked. Climbers, also made more numerous by the growing popularity of climbing gyms, are sharing the park with a total visitation that’s reached 3.5 million a year. McMillan, for one, is glad to see some structure, as well as outlets for climbers to shed light on their formerly secreted world. She’s helped start outreach opportunities at Yosemite, where climbers are invited to put on slide shows and interpretive talks at the park’s amphitheater.

Tom Medema, a supervisory park ranger at Yosemite who is a climber himself, said impacts from climbers don’t worry him any more than the effects from other groups.

“The climbers are on the granite, and the granite is the most sustainable of all our resources,” he says. “If all of our user groups recreated on granite, we would have a lot less erosion.”

Still, climbers and park officials have joined to tackle some of the effects of climbing. Like climbers at Joshua Tree, Yosemite climbers have been making strides to reduce social trailing and remove hardware from the rocks. Last September marked the second annual Yosemite Facelift, a cooperative cleanup between Yosemite National Park and the Yosemite Climbing Association, a nonprofit group promoting climbing and the history of climbing.

“They remove tons and tons of trash, and that’s become a very positive tool,” Medema says.

Lincoln Else, who was Yosemite’s climbing ranger for five years, believes the relationship between climbers and rangers is “good and getting better.”

“Most of the conflicts that arise between climbers and rangers have nothing to do with climbing,” says Else. “They’re often the same issues that arise with other visitors: storing food correctly, camping in designated campgrounds, overstaying the visitation limit, speeding, and so on.”

As for the state of Camp 4, McMillan said climbers should have a look around the park’s other campgrounds before they complain—they’re all suffering the ill effects of chronic underfunding, she says. Camp 4 costs the least and is the only one that doesn’t require a reservation.

“The Park Service doesn’t have the budget to fix up all the campsites at once,” she says. But the Yosemite Valley Plan calls for just that, starting next year—a new layout for Camp 4 that includes double the number of camp spaces and a new bathroom, plans that very few climbers are aware of, says McMillan.

Partly owing to the education efforts that climbers themselves have promoted, Camp 4 was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003 because of its role as the birthplace of big-wall climbing. And climbers shouldn’t be too eager to rip old-style pitons out of Yosemite’s granite; resource managers and archaeologists at the park are starting to think those, too, should be preserved. After all, it’s evidence of the very beginnings of a long-term relationship between climbers and the park—a relationship that should continue far into the park’s second century.

Bruce Leonard writes the “Road to Adventure” column for Trailer Life magazine. Anne Minard is a freelance writer who teaches journalism at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.