Bella Canvas Unisex Tee

"Remember the rock, the other climber — climb clean."

- Yvon Chouinard, Tom Frost, Doug Robinson - 1972

At a time when a nationwide fixed anchor prohibition in designated Wilderness is being proposed, the Yosemite Climbing Association has collaborated with leading climbers and land managers to answer the call for a grassroots voluntary consensus agreement amongst Yosemite climbers. YCA understands that how we as a community care for our public lands determines the level of regulation necessary to protect it, and thereby our future access.

We invite you to join YCA in taking the lead—Climb Clean: It’s the Yosemite Way!

Yosemite National Park is recognized globally as the center of big wall climbing and has consistently served as the proving ground for advancing climbing techniques and equipment, while pushing the limits of what is humanly possible. For climbers—drawn by its wild spirit and epic terrain, the challenge of climbing its vast granite faces or monolithic boulders, and the camaraderie of kindred innovators and adventurers—Yosemite is so much more!

As a community, how we care for the areas in which we climb has a direct impact on the level of protective regulation needed and the degree of access afforded to current and future generations of climbers.　　

At a time when there are pressures to impose a nationwide fixed anchor prohibition in designated Wilderness, we have the power to come together as a community and embrace a set of shared ethics and values. What was true in 1972 is still true today: "We believe the only way to ensure the climbing experience for ourselves and future generations is to preserve (1) the vertical wilderness, and (2) the adventure inherent in the experience." (Yvon Chouinard and Tom Frost, 1972: Chouinard Equipment Catalog)

As defined by the Wilderness Act of 1964, Wilderness "in contrast with those areas where [humans] and [their] works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by [humans]." With nearly all of Yosemite National Park designated as Wilderness, any route that ascends above roughly 200 feet off the Valley floor or is located more than 200 feet from the Tioga Road in the high country falls into this highest category of protection—where climbers can experience unconfined freedom and adventure.　

In collaboration with a diverse group of Yosemite climbers and with input from the Yosemite Climbing Rangers, the Yosemite Climbing Association (YCA) has developed the following community values, based on a renewed vision of the Clean Climbing Manifesto advocated by Yvon Chouinard and his colleagues in 1972, where climbers share a responsibility to show restraint in the wilderness, to respect Indigenous rights, to protect wildlife, and to be a voice against threats to the places we climb.　

The intention of the Climber’s Credo is to provide the Yosemite climbing community and land managers with a powerful tool to promote Yosemite’s minimum impact climbing ethics and inspire the following critical values to protect the Park’s Wilderness and climbing culture.