Leave no Trace and Climbing Regulations

Leave No Trace (LNT) is an education program that was started in the 1990s by the U. S. Forest Services, and it teaches about the outdoor ethics using a scientific approach. LNT is practiced for most outdoor recreation activities, such as fishing, kayaking, hiking, and climbing. It's mainly used to regulate the sustainability of the natural environment for native plants and animals in a specific area. There are seven principles of LNT:

1. Plan ahead and prepare

2. Travel and camp on durable surfaces

3. Dispose waste properly

4. Minimize campfire impacts

5. Leave what you find

6. Be considerate of other visitors

7. Respect wildlife

In the climbing community, there's a lot of controversy about whether the climbing regulations are too strict for climbers, and recreational managers don't understand the differences in the type of climbing. For example, Schuster et al. (2001) examine the different attitudes towards management for trad and sport climbers. They found that trad climbers reported having negative attitudes towards rec management because they favor sport climbing more often than trad climbing. Essentially, sport climbers collaborate with recreational management and get approved to put permanent bolts into the face of a cliff. As a park regulation, this limits climbing routes outdoors to specific front-country sites, limiting the access for trad climbers to go beyond these sites. In contrast, trad climbers use hardware that doesn't require putting permanent bolts; instead, they find the weakest points of a rock and wedge a cam to support their clipped-in rope and they are retrieved by a belayer so no trace of climbing is left behind. Trad climbing often gets mistaken for sport climbing in the recreational management process, and there are limited collaborations with trad climbers since it's not as popular as sport climbing. 

Nonetheless, amongst all types of climbing, it is clear that climbing tends to be micromanaged by park regulations, and all climbers agree with this. Whether it is for environmental purposes, such as preserving wildlife, or the climbing experience, such as leaving chalk marks, it is clear that most outdoor climbers find the regulations unfair.