Writing About Oak Flat: Climbing, Land, and the Stories We Don’t Get to Ignore

Photo from Climbing Magazine

Some stories stick with you longer than others. Oak Flat was one of them.

When I first took on this assignment, I knew it wasn’t just another climbing piece. Oak Flat — Chi’chil Biłdagoteel — isn’t just a bouldering playground. It’s a sacred place for the Western Apache. It’s a proving ground for American climbing. And now, it’s a battleground over who gets to define what land is worth.

I spent weeks reading, interviewing, digging into the history. Every time I thought I had a clean through-line — climbers, access, culture — the story pulled wider. It forced me to look harder at who gets erased when we talk about “outdoor recreation” like it happens in a vacuum.

Because it doesn’t. It never has.

Climbing touches everything. It’s public lands. It’s extraction. It’s whose histories get remembered and whose get strip-mined.

The early competitions at Oak Flat — the duct-taped jackets, the sun-faded crash pads, the feeling of being part of something bigger — are part of the story. But so are the sacred ceremonies still held there. So are the lawsuits. So are the mining trucks waiting on the edge of the desert.

Writing about Oak Flat was a reminder that if we’re going to keep telling climbing stories, they better be bigger than beta and brush kits. They better take seriously the land they happen on — and the people who have called it home long before a climber ever topped out.

There’s still a chance Oak Flat can be protected. There’s still a chance the court will listen. But even if it’s lost, the story isn’t.

The land holds the memory. The question is whether we’ll pay attention.

If you want to read more directly, you can find the Apache Stronghold case filings and the Access Fund’s work on Oak Flat here.

The full story will be published in Gripped Magazine’s June/July issue. I'm grateful to have had the chance to tell even a piece of it.

— Ryleigh Norgrove