Deep Cut Guide

Climbing on Pike-San Isabel National Forests land

312 crags on this site sit on ground Pike-San Isabel National Forests manages, with 3,078 routes between them. Everything below is what Pike-San Isabel National Forests itself states.

The forest behind the South Platte, Eleven Mile, Turkey Rocks and the Front Range granite domes. Free to enter; the rules that bite on a climbing trip are the stay limits and the fact that developed sites are run by a concessionaire and are not free.

What they require

Fees
No entrance fee for the Pike-San Isabel National Forests or the Cimarron and Comanche National Grasslands. Fees apply at campgrounds and day-use areas operated by the forest's concessionaire, paid on site.
Overnight
On the Leadville, Salida and San Carlos districts of the San Isabel, camping at any location within the same 20-mile radius for more than 14 days in a continuous 30-day period is prohibited. No camping within 100 feet of water outside a developed or designated site.

Read against source 1, source 2, source 3 and checked 2026-09-29 by John Crawford. Pike-San Isabel National Forests's own climbing page is the one to believe over this one.

A heading missing from that list is a question Pike-San Isabel National Forests'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

20 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.

South Platte

Colorado Springs

Buena Vista

Independence Pass

Alpine Rock

Wet Mountains, The

Leadville

CO Ice & Mixed

Fremont Pass

Silver Basin

Weston Pass-(Weston Wall)

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.