How Many Climbers Are in America?

How many climbers are in the United States? There is no firm number. An Outdoor Industry Association survey shows that the number of Americans over the age of 16 that have “climbed at least once with a rope and harness on a natural rock surface” jumped from 7.5 million in 2004 to 9.2 million in 2005. Now three years later, how many climbers are there? And, of course, you can inflate that total by including those who have only climbed in an indoor gym, boosting the number to at least 12 million. And that doesn’t include kids.

Those numbers are pretty big. Too big I think. My sense is that the number of active regular climbers in America, those who climb at least ten times a year, is somewhere around 500,000. The Outdoor Industry survey, however, puts that number closer to two million. Climbing has always been a fringe sport. For one thing it’s dangerous. Most of those almost nine million climbers are folks that have tried climbing once or twice, maybe at Scout camp or with a school or church group, or on a guided outing with a mass group. At Front Range Climbing Company in Colorado Springs, a guide service I work with, we regularly take big groups, like kids at the YMCA summer camp, out climbing for the afternoon at Red Rock Canyon. For most of them, this is their first and only exposure to real climbing.

All these climbers, however, are putting a big strain on our climbing resources—the cliffs, crags, big walls, and boulders out on our nation’s public lands in national parks and monuments, state and city parks, BLM and Forest Service lands, and wilderness areas. A lot of new climbers are coming straight from the indoor gym to the great outdoors and don’t have a clue about outdoor etiquette and the leave-no-trace ethic that governs our sport and allows us to climb at all these wonderful places. In the next few months I will be posting a series of articles about how to minimize your impact on our climbing areas. In the meantime, I urge you to support The Access Fund, an advocacy group for climbers that helps keep American climbing areas open and works with both climbers and land managers to conserve and preserve these precious resources. Do your part—climb responsibly and lightly.

Photo above: Lauri cranks at Shelf Road, one of America’s well-used sport climbing areas..
Photograph © Stewart M. Green