Deep Cut Guide

Climbing on City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks land

96 crags on this site sit on ground City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks manages, with 1,957 routes between them. Everything below is what City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks itself states.

OSMP manages the Flatirons and the city side of Boulder Canyon, and counts over 1,400 climbing opportunities on its land. Since 2003 it has run a memorandum of understanding with the Flatirons Climbing Council covering new bolted routes and hardware replacement.

What they require

Fees
Parking fees apply at certain trailheads for vehicles not registered in Boulder County.
Permits
Off-trail permits are required to reach some climbing areas inside Habitat Conservation Areas.
Climbing permit
It is illegal to place fixed protection without a permit. Replacement and new bolted routes go through the Flatirons Climbing Council application, decided by OSMP.
Rules
Climbing gear -- ropes, webbing, slings, quickdraws -- may not be left unattended. Grooming, tree cutting, rock gluing and chipping are prohibited. Drones are prohibited. Seasonal raptor closures run 15 December to 31 July depending on species.
Overnight
Camping is prohibited on Open Space and Mountain Parks, as are tents, nets and other structures. The exception is Buckingham Campground at Fourth of July Trailhead.
Dogs
All dogs must be leashed unless the dog and its guardian are registered in the Voice & Sight Tag Program, and off-leash dogs must display the city's V&S tag and rabies tags.

Read against source 1, source 2, source 3 and checked 2026-09-29 by John Crawford. City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks's own climbing page is the one to believe over this one.

A heading missing from that list is a question City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks'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

23 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.

Boulder

CO Ice & Mixed

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.