Saving Space for Climbing: Reflections on the RRGCC Acquisition

A big walk on the new property.

It’s tradition, in this part of Kentucky, to save seeds.

Each crack in the sandstone once held a kind of insurance — small stashes, tucked away by the Shawnee for the coming spring. The land didn’t need saving, not really. They did it anyway. Careful, stubborn, as if planting the rock itself.

The Gorge isn’t just stone and seed anymore. It’s been taken, hollowed, taken again. Last month, the Red River Gorge Climbers’ Coalition (RRGCC) laid claim to 718 acres — the largest land acquisition made by a local climbing organization in U.S. history.

It’s a win, but one that mirrors the moment: wilderness brokered into paperwork, bought in the name of preservation.

I spent part of the winter bushwhacking through the new property with Curtis Rogers, the RRGCC’s president. There’s no clean trail forward here. It’s thick country — brittle oak roots underfoot, old gas pumps rusted to the bone, tire tracks veining the sandstone cliffs. We cracked through dried leaves, moving toward dropped pins Curtis had scouted as future climbing areas.

From somewhere behind us, a sedan-sized icicle peeled off the ridgeline and shattered. Curtis didn’t flinch. If spring was coming, so was climbing season.

What will soon bloom is now at rest — a dense, twisted mess of underbrush and memory. And that’s the work: not just buying land, but deciding what to do with it. Cultivating it. Managing it. Owning it in all the complicated, legal, expensive ways that conservation now demands.

The Ashland acquisition is a bright spot, but it doesn’t come without weight. Private ownership means someone carries the liability, the erosion, the parking lots, the rules. Climbers move into a new role: not just stewards, but gatekeepers.

That tension lives at the heart of this piece — and of the broader story still unfolding.

The first version of this reporting ran with Gripped Magazine here.

I'm also working on a broader feature looking at how outdoor spaces are shifting hands — and what that means for public land, climbing, and the myths we build around both, more on that soon.

The seeds are there. The question is whether we’ll keep tending them — or if we’ll lose the thread in the noise.

—Ryleigh Norgrove