In the summer of 1972 I was on the climbing road; that is, wandering around western America thoroughly enjoying a simple, Spartan existence, living in my VW bus, climbing as much as possible and, of course, always looking for new adventures and climbing areas. That road, as always, brought me to Ketchum for a time, and Rob Kiesel suggested I check out this cool climbing area called the City of Rocks, a few hours south. He told me how to get to the tiny town of Oakley south of Burley and then described the unmarked dirt roads that led to "the City." He recommended that once I got there, I find the southwest corner of the City and climb the southwest face of the largest rock there for starters and to work it out for myself after that. He assured me I would not be disappointed or bored.
Accordingly, a few days later Lance Poulsen and I found ourselves at the lowest point of the base of the southwest face of the largest rock in the southwest corner of the City of Rocks. We climbed it and were neither disappointed nor bored by its 300-400 feet of technical and sometimes not-very-well-protected adventure. Nearly 40 years and hundreds of climbs later, the City remains neither disappointing nor boring, though like the rest of the earth it has changed noticeably. I don't think we saw another human being during that first trip to the City.
We did not know it at the time, but the rock we climbed is called the South Sister and is composed of some of the oldest exposed rock on earth, some 2.5 billion-year-old metamorphosed stone. The much younger North Sister, only a few feet away, is a completely different rock, granite, and is a comparative youngster only 25 million years old. The Twin Sisters are two of the largest rocks at the City and some of its best climbing is on their faces, but a few years ago they were declared off limits to climbing. Outlaw ascents of the Sisters are not unknown, but more law-abiding climbing citizens are actively campaigning and patiently waiting a lifting of the ban.
Fortunately for climbers, there is plenty of climbing beside the Sisters at the City, which is a roughly 3 mile-by-6-mile, high-desert valley on the southeast slopes of Idaho's Albion Range, most of it between 6,000 and 7,000 feet elevation. There are hundreds of mostly granite spires, knobs, faces, walls, slabs, corridors and rocks with enough climbing routes to keep the most dedicated climber busy for a lifetime or two or three. It is a rock climber's paradise, but it is much, much more. I was fortunate to climb there in the "early days" with a variety of partners—Poulsen, Joe Kelsey, Craig Shanholtzer, Jim Little, Missy Gilholm, Lois Rice, Ken Corrock, Chris Bonington, Dave Stelling, Kim Schmitz, among others—and often we would camp at the City for a week and sometimes longer.
Our favorite place to camp was at the highest point of the northwest entrance where there is now a hand water pump. In the '70s the most convenient drinkable water was a spring-fed spigot filling a cattle trough about a hundred yards away. There was no beer or wine for sale within an hour's drive of the City, and more than one climber made the thirst-quenching drive after a hard day on the stone. Ranchers have run cattle in and around the City for well over a hundred years, and they still do. Ranching remains the economic base, but tourism (including but not limited to climbers) has changed the landscape itself, the economics and the very culture of what had been a Mormon-based, insular, rural community. In the early years we saw far more cows than people at the City, and most of the people were rancher/farmers driving the dirt roads animated by a hard-work ethic. As climbers we assumed we were viewed by the locals with a mixture of bemusement and curiosity for our activity and with resentment, disdain and disapproval for our lifestyle.
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We climbed nearly every day and seldom saw any other climbers. Every so often we would be climbing a route that for all we knew had never been climbed before and we would find a piton or a sling or some other sign of previous climbers. The history of the City of Rocks, climbing and otherwise, is incompletely understood and, in some cases, inaccurately reported.
The first humans in the area were Northern Shoshone Native Americans, but during the mid-19th century a quarter million emigrants traveling the California and Oregon trails passed through what one of them, James F. Wilkins, in 1849 termed "the City of Rocks." The name stuck even if the emigrants kept going west.
By the mid-1980s the City of Rocks was on the radar of the climbing community and climbers from all over the world were making it part of their circuit. In addition, hikers, bird watchers, mountain bikers, four-wheelers and motorcyclists, car campers and people who just wanted to party down in the open air were frequenting the City. They (we) were camping wherever there was space on the fragile, high-desert landscape and the impacts on the countryside were significant and troubling. During this time David Stelling and I were buying groceries in the store in Oakley and we were clearly not 'locals.' The clerk asked us where we were from and we answered that we were on our way to climb at the City. The clerk opined that it was a crime the way that climbers and campers were overrunning and destroying the natural landscape of the City of Rocks. I replied that it seemed to me that cattle were doing more damage than people to the City, a response clearly not appreciated by the clerk or the other grocery customers in Oakley and which caused me concern that Stelling would have a coronary before we got out of the store in one piece.
But the clerk's point was well taken. Something had to be and was done. On Nov. 18, 1988, the U.S. Congress passed legislation that created the City of Rocks National Reserve by essentially drawing a circle on a map and declaring those 14,407 acres a reserve. The National Park Service then took over ownership of the lands, formerly managed by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Today they are jointly managed by the National Park Service and the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation. There are more than 60 designated campsites in the City, a new completely paved RV campground with showers a 10-minute drive away, a more rustic, non-fee camping area a few minutes farther away, and a limited amount of very nice lodging accommodations in the town of Almo, a 12-minute drive from the City. Amenities in Almo include a hot springs with three pools of different temperatures, a grocery store where one can rent a shower, a gas station, two restaurants that serve beer and wine, and a pay telephone at the park headquarters.
While the landscape from a distance looks much the same as it has for thousands of years, the climbing experience at the City of Rocks has changed significantly since, say, 1972.
A favorite campsite in the City of Rocks. The City of Rocks National Reserve recently celebrated its 2o th anniversary.
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