A history of climbing access.

Britain: the Kinder Scout mass trespass, 1932

The account here comes from the Kinder 80 programme written by Roly Smith in 2012 and hosted by the BMC. On Sunday 24 April 1932, about 400 ramblers set out from Bowden Bridge quarry near Hayfield, after a rally addressed by Benny Rothman, to trespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak District. The trespass was organised by the Lancashire branch of the British Workers' Sports Federation.

Six ramblers were arrested. After a trial at Derby Assizes in July 1932, five were jailed for between two and six months. A few weeks later, the programme says, 10,000 ramblers rallied in the Winnats Pass.

What happened on the hill is told two ways in the same programme:

• The trespassers' tradition: a scuffle with gamekeepers in which one keeper was hurt.
• A gamekeeper's memory: John Watson recalled the trespassers leaving the path for only about 50 yards before going back to it at a whistle signal.

From trespass to the right to roam

The Kinder 80 programme traces the laws that followed:

When the CROW access rights took effect on the ground is not settled in our research. The Act passed in 2000; one source, seen as a search summary of Wikipedia, says the right to roam on uncultivated land came into law in 2003. We did not find an official source for the date.

Scotland has its own access law. The programme quotes the general secretary of the Open Spaces Society describing it in 2012 as well ahead of the law in England and Wales.

United States: the Access Fund

The Access Fund's history page (read 21 October 2026) says access problems appeared across the US in the mid-1980s, alongside the rise of sport climbing. It says the American Alpine Club formed an Access Committee in 1985, and that the Access Fund became a separate organisation in 1991 because the problems had spread so widely. One of its first decisions, it says, was not to take sides in ethical debates such as bolting but to defend climbing in all its forms. Its early fights included anti-bolt policies at individual national parks and forests.

Michael Kennedy, then Access Fund president, wrote in the American Alpine Journal in 1999 that land managers had been largely uninvolved with climbing when he started in 1970. He put climbing's growth in the 1980s down to better gear, sport climbing, gyms and guidebooks. He estimated about 150,000 climbers in the US in 1985 and roughly 500,000 in 1999; those are his own estimates, and we could not confirm them from another source. The National Park Service's climbing history (2021) says several parks studied climbing's impact in the late 1980s and wrote climbing management plans in the 1990s.

Devils Tower, 1995

The NPS (news release, 12 May 2017) says the Devils Tower climbing management plan of 1995 created a voluntary closure to climbing for all of June each year, out of respect for the tower's spiritual and cultural importance to American Indian tribes, more than twenty of which consider it sacred. The plan was agreed by a work group that included tribal and climbing representatives, and the NPS says the Access Fund supports it. According to the US Solicitor General's brief in Bear Lodge v. Babbitt, the 1995 plan originally barred commercial climbing permits in June, a provision the NPS later rescinded.

Search summaries of High Country News and Outside say climbing guides and the Bear Lodge Multiple Use Association sued over the plan in 1996, arguing it was religiously motivated; we could not confirm the details of the filing. The outcome is reported differently:

• One source says a federal court blocked the part of the plan that accommodated Indian religious practice, the commercial ban.
• Outside says the courts ultimately upheld the plan.
• High Country News (2003) says the Supreme Court declined to hear the climbers' case and that the voluntary closure stands.

We read only secondary summaries of the case, not the court record.

1998: a year of disputes

Kennedy's 1999 article records several fights in a single year:

• US Forest Service. In June 1998 the Forest Service banned fixed anchors in all the Wilderness areas it manages. A coalition objected, the system-wide ban was withdrawn within months, and a negotiated rulemaking on fixed anchors began. Anchors remained prohibited in Idaho's Sawtooth Wilderness.
• City of Rocks, Idaho. In September 1998 the NPS plan for City of Rocks made a closure of the Twin Sisters permanent after a five-year moratorium. In November 1998 the Access Fund sued the NPS on behalf of nine climbers.
• Hueco Tanks, Texas. Texas Parks and Wildlife imposed severe restrictions at Hueco Tanks, and climbers largely abandoned the area.
• Camp 4, Yosemite. Climbers paid for and organised the fight to preserve Camp 4, which was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places; see Yosemite and the big walls.

High Country News (2003, seen as a search summary) traces Hueco Tanks' problems to bolting disputes and vandalism of rock art in the 1980s, including a three-week ban on rope climbing in 1988. It says the park's public use plan requires reservations and limits most of the park to guided tours. The plan's date is given as 1998 by most sources, including Kennedy, and as 2000 by Tribeza (seen as a search summary).

Later developments

The NPS timeline says the Park Service issued a policy on managing climbing in wilderness in 2013. The fixed-anchor question returned in the 2020s. KUNC and the Mountain West News Bureau (Hanna Merzbach, 19 June 2026) reported that Congress's 2024 Protecting America's Rock Climbing (PARC) act protected existing anchors, and that on 15 June 2026 four federal agencies released new draft guidance that would officially allow fixed anchors. As of 21 October 2026 we found no final adopted version, so the 2026 guidance should be read as a draft. Current access rules, closures and the BMC's bolting policy are on access and ethics, and the bolt disputes behind some of these fights are on sport climbing and bolts.