Deep Cut Guide

Climbing on Bureau of Land Management land

214 crags on this site sit on ground Bureau of Land Management manages, with 5,193 routes between them. Everything below is what Bureau of Land Management itself states.

BLM land carries Shelf Road, Unaweep and Penitente among others. Nothing is charged to walk in and climb, and no permit is stated for it. What costs money is staying: the developed campgrounds beside the crags are fee sites, and the occupancy rules are stricter than people expect.

What they require

Fees
Developed campgrounds are fee sites: at Shelf Road, Sand Gulch is $20 a night for an individual site and $40 for a group site, with no drinking water, hook-ups or trash service. Where a fee area is posted, you must register and pay within 30 minutes of entering it.
Overnight
Camping more than 14 days in any 30-day period at any one location is prohibited, including in a campground, and afterwards you must move at least 30 air miles. Personal property may not be left unattended anywhere on public land for more than 48 hours.

Read against source 1, source 2, source 3 and checked 2026-09-29 by John Crawford. Bureau of Land Management's own climbing page is the one to believe over this one.

A heading missing from that list is a question Bureau of Land Management's pages don't answer, not a rule that doesn't exist. This page never says climbing is allowed somewhere — none of these pages says that either, and reading permission into a page's silence is how people end up somewhere they shouldn't be.

Where the line matters

60 of these crags have another manager's land within 250 m of their map point. A crag's map point is not the rock — it can be hundreds of metres out — so at those crags the wall itself may be on someone else's ground, under someone else's rules. Each crag's own page names the neighbour.

Grand Junction Area

Gunnison

Durango

Buena Vista

Canon City

Naturita and Paradox Valley

San Luis Valley

Eagle/Vail/Minturn/Red Cliff

Montrose

Grand County / Fraser Valley

Rifle

Glenwood Springs

Cross Mountain Boulders

Fremont Pass

Golden

Irish Canyon

CO Ice & Mixed

Four Corners Area

Ouray vicinity (rock)

Parachute/ Battlement Mesa

Silverton area

Telluride/Norwood area

Which crag sits on whose land comes from USGS PAD-US (public domain), read at each crag's map point. Every manager whose rules we've written down, and which ones we haven't. Closures are tracked separately and dated.