Historical Information about Hueco Tanks Climbing

TPWD's publications say Hueco Tanks has been an anthropogenic site — a landscape shaped by people — for at least 10,000 years. Based on recent findings at nearby White Sands, where human footprints have now been dated to 21,000–23,000 years ago, that number is almost certainly closer to 20–25 thousand.

Climbers love to imagine twenty millennia of children dangling from Hueco's famous hueco-covered roofs — pulled upward by the same spirit that has drawn modern rock climbers here for the past seventy years. Though it has only been considered “sport” for the last couple of centuries, the concept of rock climbing hasn't changed much in 20,000 years.

There is little documentation of Native people rock climbing at Hueco Tanks, but one well-known rock art panel — colloquially called the Kiowa Siege Panel — records a harrowing three-day siege of Kiowa scouts by Mexican dragoons in a canyon on East Mountain.

At the left side of the panel is a depiction of the scouts escaping the siege by climbing up a crack in the rock, surprising some of the dragoons guarding the top of the mountain. To be fair, some interpretations hold that they climbed a tree or roots instead — but in the back of the canyon is a two-to-three-foot-wide chimney that, fairly easily, allows access to the top of the mountain. Many climbers consider that desperate escape the first recorded climb at Hueco Tanks.

Modern climbing culture has existed at Hueco Tanks since at least the 1950s, when students at Texas Western College (renamed UTEP in 1967) formed a climbing club called the Kliff Klimbers. In January of 1956, the club helped protect the park's pictographs by posting signs at six major rock art sites — including the Ysleta del Sur sun glyph at the site erroneously known today as “Comanche Cave.”

Also in the 1950s, legendary mountaineer Royal Robbins established the first known rope leads on the front side of North and West Mountains.

In 1975, El Paso climber Mike Head came across this obscure pile of rock in the Texas desert. While he and his partners established many of the area's first documented routes, they also foresaw the potential of climbing on all of the rock faces — even the smaller, steeper ones.

Around 1980, the quiet Tucson climber Bob Murray began pioneering bouldering at Hueco Tanks alongside early developers like Mike Head. While most climbers of the era still saw boulders as practice for routes, Murray explored the area's bouldering potential for its own sake, setting the park's earliest testpieces.

His classics include Left El Murray and Center El Murray — both V6 — on the historic Mushroom Boulder, problems established more than a decade before the V scale even existed to grade them.

Hosted by the El Paso Climbers Club.

Through the 1980s and 90s, John “The Verm” Sherman widely developed Hueco's bouldering and birthed the V-grading system here — the “V” is for Verm — which went on to become the standard bouldering scale worldwide. His 1991 guidebook put the area on the map, and word spread about this bouldering mecca as curious climbers made the trek to the east El Paso site.

Word of Hueco's potential reached the world's strongest climbers. Swiss boulderer Fred Nicole established the area's first V13 in 1995, its first V14 in 1997, and a V15 in 2005 — each among the hardest boulder problems on the planet at the time, cementing Hueco Tanks as a proving ground for world-class bouldering.

The second edition of John Sherman's guidebook is published.

Hueco was loved too much by all — and abused by some. In 1998, after years of surging visitation and mounting damage to the fragile rock art and desert landscape, TPWD imposed a sweeping set of access restrictions with little public consultation. Overnight, the wide-open Hueco of the 1980s and 90s was nearly gone: roughly two-thirds of the park could only be visited on guided tours of limited size, visitor numbers were capped, and many classic areas became effectively off-limits for several years.

To climbers around the world, it is remembered simply as when the park closed.

After a public review and hard-fought negotiations between TPWD, Native representatives, local climbers and the Access Fund, a revised Public Use Plan took effect in 2000. It created the system still in place today: a reservation system with self-guided access to North Mountain, and a guide program for East Mountain, West Mountain, and the East Spur.

Helping provide access to these historic bouldering areas — through commercial guides and volunteer pictograph tours — is a big part of why the Hueco Climbers Alliance exists.

John Sherman's third Hueco Tanks guidebook.

First Hueco Rock Rodeo hosted by the Rock Ranch

Matt Wilder's guidebook to Hueco Tanks bouldering.

After almost 20 years of operating under the Public Use Plan, The park organized a working group to revisit the plan, and once again members of all communities gathered together to discuss their interests in the park. After a few contentious meetings, TPWD decided to photograph every known climb in the park, and use new "D-stretch" color filtering technology to determine if there were unknown pictographs potentially being damaged by climbers. Many of the "found" pictographs were just smudges of pigment, nearly invisible to naked eye, but as a result several dozen climbs (many historic) were closed.

Jason Kehl and Matt Wilder's guide to bouldering on North Mountain.

Development at Hueco Tanks never stopped. Longtime local Jason Kehl — renowned for his highball first ascents, his artwork, and decades of new lines — continues to uncover five-star problems across the park, proof that even after 20,000 years of human hands on this rock, Hueco still holds secrets.