Best Practices Guide

[Optimally-Primed]

BC Parks, in conjunction with a climbing advisory group, is developing a Best Practices Guide for Rock Climbing Route Development for Stawamus Chief Park, Shannon Falls Park, and Murrin Park.

At this stage in the process you have an opportunity to provide information, express your opinion and suggest alternatives. Your may provide feedback online or at a public meeting that will likely be held in November.

Find the Best Practices Guide and other information at this link

[squamish climber]

From the introduction:

Essentially, rock climbs are manicured vertical trails

Nice line, I admit it makes my groveling sound even more pathetic when you think all I'm really doing is ascending a manicured trail.

On a more serious note hopefully people will take the time to carefully read the report and provide some helpful feedback. What I find encouraging about the whole thing is the spirit of working together and trying to find consensus. You get the sense that everybody including BC Parks would prefer self-regulation over top down rule making.

Despite the absence of 'Thou shall not...' type of statements you can imagine that if these guidelines were ignored on a large scale the alternative would be more rules and more enforcement. So we better try to get it right and achieve as much buy in as possible.

All these guidelines are commonsense...on paper at least. I think there will be more agreement around safety issues and less around vegetation removal.

And one big issue I don't see addressed here - is the issue of constructing via-ferratas - this was not on the radar when this report was initiated to deal with route cleaning so it's not really a criticism of report. I raise it now as a topic that should maybe be included.

What do people think of that point specifically and the report in general.

Thanks to all the folks who worked on this: Jeremy Frimer, Dave Zevick, Colin Moorhead, Jeremy Smith, Marc Bourdon, Charlie Harrison, Katy Holm, John Howe, Andre Ike, Pete Winter and everybody else who contributed.

[harihari]

Some interesting stuff, esp. in light of a few near-misses (on my and others' parts) over the last few years.

Most significant is "Anyone performing route development is completely responsible for his/her actions, regardless of the risk mitigation they may have used." More or less in line with liability in industry, workplace etc in the rest of BC.