A Federal Court of Appeals has upheld the U.S. Forest Service’s ban on climbing Cave Rock, a sacred site on the shore of Lake Tahoe. Cave Rock is a 360-foot high, 800-foot wide dome sacred to the Washoe as a home for spirits that have medicinal powers. The area supports many recreational uses, including hiking and fishing, but it is best known as an advanced climbing spot. The Forest Service, which manages Cave Rock under the jurisdiction of the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, recognized the damage done to Cave Rock through the insertion of bolts and other climbing hardware into the rock. In 2003, it banned climbing on Cave Rock in an effort to maintain the physical integrity of this sacred place.

The Access Fund, a non-profit organization of climbers, sued to overturn the ban, alleging that it violated the First Amendment’s establishment of religion clause. While a Federal District Court dismissed the action in January 2005, the Access Fund persisted and brought the case to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In August 2007, a three-judge panel ruled that the Forest Service’s climbing ban is constitutional because the Forest Service is protecting Cave Rock as an archaeological, cultural, and historical national resource, not because it is sacred to the Washoe. Thus the Forest Service is not supporting a specific religious practice. The protection of Cave Rock from egregious recreational use is an important victory; however, the legal reasoning used to arrive at this verdict does not appear to provide a precedent for sacred land protection based on ongoing religious use of a place. Read more in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals August 27, 2007 decision and in our full report on Cave Rock.

While the Forest Service supervises museum exhibits and archaeological sites dedicated to Washoe culture, the contemporary Washoe are still separated from their land. The tribe continues to lobby for the return of some of its traditional land base around Lake Tahoe. The Access Fund has not announced any further legal action, so as of this writing, Cave Rock is off-limits to climbers, though other recreational uses around it continue.