All About Bolts: From Federal Policy, to A Day of Local Rebolting With Ryan Kuehn

This episode is all about bolts. From the nitty gritty of yanking a bad bolt out of the rock at your local sport crag, to the big-picture policies that govern the practice of bolting and rebolting on America’s federal public lands.

For the main part of this episode, we talk about the under-appreciated art of bolt replacement with Ryan Kuehn, one of the leads for the Anchor Replacement Program at the Boulder Climbing Community (BCC), an integral local climbing org for the Front Range of Colorado. We also start the episode with insights from the AAC’s Director of Government Affairs, Byron Harvison, who shares an update on the proposed implementation guidance of the EXPLORE ACT and PARC Act—the historic laws that preserved fixed anchors as appropriate in Wilderness Areas. Bryon explains how the proposed implementation policy, just released and open to public comment, will impact how climbers and LCO’s will place and maintain bolts and other fixed anchors on federal public lands moving forward.

Dive in to get the full picture: from federal policy to a day of local rebolting.

*** We would like to offer clarification on the statement at 15:29 which states that a MRA will be utilized by the BLM for routes which fail the casual use standard.  To be clear, the MRA is to be used when the BLM proposes to prohibit climbing in an area.  The proposed guidance states that a yet-to-be-determined process will be utilized to evaluate those routes that exceed the draft casual use standard.