Deep Cut Guide

Climbing on Rocky Mountain National Park land

101 crags on this site sit on ground Rocky Mountain National Park manages, with 1,034 routes between them. Everything below is what Rocky Mountain National Park itself states.

RMNP holds Lumpy Ridge, Longs Peak and the alpine walls. Two separate things are needed in season and climbers routinely get caught by only knowing about one: a park entrance pass, and a timed entry reservation for the hours in the middle of the day.

What they require

Fees
A park entrance pass is required. $30 for one private vehicle for one day, $35 for seven days, or $70 for a park-specific annual pass.
Reservations
Timed entry reservations are required 22 May to 12 October 2026, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily, and 5 a.m. to 6 p.m. for the Bear Lake Road corridor (to 18 October). They cover outlying areas including Longs Peak and Lumpy Ridge, not just the main road. $2 processing fee.
Permits
A timed entry reservation is separate from, and additional to, the entrance pass -- the park says a valid entrance pass is also required.

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

A heading missing from that list is a question Rocky Mountain National Park'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

37 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.

Estes Park Valley

Alpine Rock

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.