Darren Smith removed the last of his climbing gear 100 feet above the ground on the red, sandstone walls near Ruin Crack in Battle of the Bulge, as Spencer Cone held a rope connected to a harness to leverage his friend back down the sheer cliff. People travel from all over the world to climb the roughly 1,500 routes on this stretch of Indian Creek in Bears Ears National Monument.
Modern climbers established routes here in the 1970s, but they weren’t the first to scale these cliffs. Ancestral Puebloan dwellings nestled in the red rock date back thousands of years. The proximity of a world-class climbing destination and sensitive cultural sites has been a recipe for tension between climbers, conservationists and the tribes whose ancestors made the area their home.
Activists and land managers are hoping that education can ease the tension...