Climbing Insurance Cited : Ban on Mountaineering Causes Rift in Sierra Club

Incensed that they can no longer scale some of their favorite Sierra Nevada peaks on Sierra Club trips, many of the club’s most avid mountaineers are waging an emotional campaign against a ban on climbing that the club’s Board of Directors imposed to avoid a skyrocketing insurance bill.

The 4 1/2-month-old ban--outlawing all club-sponsored climbing trips risky enough to require the use of ropes or ice axes--is considered heresy by Southern California club members who live for weekends in the Sierra. They have reacted by sending hundreds of angry letters to club headquarters, threatening to resign and putting together a pro-climbing candidate slate for this spring’s board elections.

The outcries have been particularly vehement in Los Angeles and Orange counties, where the Angeles Chapter has been forced to dismantle part of its popular mountaineering training course and drop about 300 mountaineering trips from its extensive outings program.

More profoundly, the climbing restriction touches the question of the club’s identity. Fervent outing devotees contend that the ban illustrates how the club has changed in recent decades as it has broadened its membership and focus, becoming one of the nation’s most politically influential environmental organizations. To drop climbing, they say, is to chip away at the club’s long tradition of venturing into the wild, turning the Sierra Club into just another arm-chair conservation group.

“It’s disheartening,” said Karen Leonard, an anthropology professor from Los Angeles who likes to spend every other weekend scampering up desert peaks. “We feel it wouldn’t be the Sierra Club if we didn’t have these adventuresome outings.”

Climbers note with an edge of bitter irony that the ban virtually puts an end to serious mountaineering in an organization named after a mountain range and founded by one of the Sierra Nevada’s most passionate explorers, conservationist John Muir.

The board has responded by appointing a task force to suggest how the club can continue to sponsor climbing without paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year more in insurance premiums. Still, at least some board members believe that the issue has been blown out of proportion by a small band of Southern California mountaineers who have a misguided idea of what the club is all about.

‘Probably Pretty Exaggerated’

“This gigantic focus on one aspect of outings is probably pretty exaggerated,” said board member and club Vice President Sally Reid, who lives near Mt. Pinos in the mountains north of Los Angeles.

“The notion that removing mountaineering would make us like any other environmental organization is just not so. . . . Even John Muir didn’t use a rope and ice ax, and his principal concern was preservation of the land from overuse,” said Reid, a task force member.

Former Executive Director David Brower, who voted for the climbing ban last September before resigning from the board for unrelated reasons, argued that mountaineering is “my tradition too, but they don’t have to be covered by . . . somebody else’s money.” The club’s purpose, he continued, is not to subsidize a fraction of the membership on climbing trips, but “to conserve the damn mountains they want to climb.”

No one in the club knows exactly how many outings involve mountaineering equipment, but board members insist that it is a very small percentage. Most outdoor activities run by chapters across the country will continue, they say. Outings for five or 10 or hundreds of members at a time range from short hikes through fields of wildflowers to backpacking treks and canoeing trips that last for weeks.

Estimates of how many of the club’s 493,000 national members venture out on mountaineering trips vary from as few as 2,000 to as many as 50,000. The task force is polling chapters to gain a better idea of how many members are affected by the climbing prohibition.

But more is at stake than money or even keeping a portion of club membership--however small--happy. It is also a matter of image, mountaineers say.

The 97-year-old organization has from its inception promoted enjoyment of the wilderness, as well as its preservation. Nearly 100 members traveled to Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows for the club’s first annual outing in 1901, starting a tradition of outdoor trips that have stamped the club with an aura of ruggedness.

“What the (board) forgot is that there’s a perception that we should be doing mountaineering,” said Bruce Knudtson, a San Francisco management consultant and one of three pro-climbing board candidates. Knudtson said that while a mere fraction of Sierra Club members may actually spend their free time scrambling up and down mountain peaks with a rope tied to their waists, a lot of members like the idea of belonging to an organization that promotes that kind of adventure.

Moreover, climbers argue, the mountaineering image is one the club fosters by putting stunning color photographs of climbers on its magazine cover and in its widely circulated calendars.

Board members say they did not want to ban mountaineering trips, but they contend that it was the only way they could dodge an insurance rate hike of at least $325,000 a year, a sum that would have more than doubled the club’s total insurance premiums. “We could not see any way of coming up with that kind of money. It was a very sobering premium,” Seattle board member Richard Fiddler said.

The club’s insurance company demanded the premium increase because there have been two to three insurance claims a year related to serious mountaineering injuries, club Financial Director Andrea Bonnette said. In particular, two Los Angeles-area members won substantial insurance settlements in negligence suits stemming from injuries they received while learning how to use an ice ax under the supervision of club mountaineering instructors.

With the largest membership and the most ambitious mountaineering program of any Sierra Club chapter in the country, the 55,000-member Angeles Chapter is feeling the effects of the climbing ban more sharply than any other.

The chapter’s rock-climbing section has existed in name only since last fall, and the outings program for the 360-member Sierra Peaks Section is a shadow of last year’s. “It just wipes us out practically,” said Bill Oliver, Sierra Peaks chairman. Last year, his group ran 22 trips to explore the northern mountains in the spring season ending in July. This spring, only eight outings are planned, and they could be scrapped if there is snow and the climbers need to use ice axes.