Sinks Canyon won’t be getting a via ferrata after all – after multiple years of back and forth, Wyoming State Parks canceled the contentious project on August 3 due to the high cost of a necessary safety assessment.
Via ferratas are climbing routes with steel cables and rungs that help people move through exposed terrain outside. Over the years, the routes have become more popular in mountain communities and create an opportunity for non-technical climbers to have a guided experience in the vertical.
A via ferrata was first officially proposed for Sinks Canyon State Park outside of Lander as part of the Sinks Canyon Master Plan, which was initiated in 2019 and released in 2020. Over the next three years, Wyoming State Parks held multiple public informational meetings and sought input from user groups and stakeholders to gauge the impact of the project on the community and the environment.
But despite those efforts, Wyoming State Parks Deputy Director Nick Neylon said the project had to be canceled when the agency determined that the cost needed to assess the safety of the selected cliff face was just too expensive.
“We were unwilling to move forward without that study, just for the protection of not only the citizens but the protection of the state – we want to make sure that we're not putting anybody or any resources in danger,” he said. “But the study came in costing far more than we anticipated it was going to, and it just didn't make any sense to continue to go forward with the project.”
Neylon said that the considerable division in the community about whether or not the via ferrata project should go forward also contributed to the State Parks’ decision to pull the plug on the project.
“We had hoped that we could find common ground and get this project done – we had a lot of people in the community who were really excited, but probably a fairly significant amount who weren't,” he said.
While some community members supported the via ferrata as an opportunity for a new kind of recreation, others worried that the project could impact the landscape and the wildlife in the canyon.
In 2021, the project’s potential site was relocated. Its original site was on wildlife habitat management area land owned by the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission, but some community members were concerned about a pair of peregrine falcons that sometimes used the cliff as a nesting site.
The site was then moved to the Sandstone Buttress, a rock formation on the other side of the mouth of the canyon.
The project’s process also created concerns about adequate tribal consultation with the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Preservation Offices, raising questions about whether or not the spiritual and historical importance of the land had been fully taken into consideration.
Moving forward, Neylon said Wyoming State Parks will be putting their energy into another, hopefully less divisive, project they’ve been working on in Sinks Canyon – a new hiking trail called the Sunny Side Trail.
“It would be open to all visitors, and it will be something that can be utilized by the existing climbing community and others – and I believe that there is no major opposition to that project,” he said.
Neylon said the agency will also be putting their energy into other communities around Wyoming that are interested in making improvements on their local state parks.
“We'll look for other projects and other exciting things to do, both in Sinks Canyon and all of our other sites, and we'll just move forward,” he said.
The new hiking trail in Sinks Canyon will likely open in the next year.
