Leah Borts-Kuperman, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Narwhal

A few days before I visited Devil’s Glen, a resident who lives near the Ontario provincial park got into a yelling match with a rock climber. It allegedly ended with the climber’s hands around the neighbour’s neck, and a call to the police. Over the years, there have also been allegations of litter stuffed into caverns used by at-risk bats, of centenary cedar trees sawed off, of cars egged and climbing routes sabotaged along this stretch of Niagara Escarpment in Clearview, Ont.

For that neighbour, Adam Pearce, concerns started shortly after he moved into his home nearly two decades ago. He began noticing rock-climbing routes on the escarpment abutting his property — hundreds of bolts on bald stretches of cliff face are a giveaway. After a climber fell eight metres and had to be rescued by fire crews and paramedics, Pearce redoubled his efforts to understand how the sport was being monitored and regulated by Ontario Parks. 

He learned it largely wasn’t. For years, rock climbing was just an illicit pastime he and parks ecologists worried about. Then, the Government of Ontario officially sanctioned it. 

I met Adam and his wife, Holly, at their house in late August. Flower beds and bird houses decorated the property, along with dozens of animal skulls the couple has found. We entered a trail out the back of their yard, where they’ve erected “No Trespassing” signs. Within minutes, we were in the park, beginning our descent along a thin slice of trail overlooking a steep drop into the forest below. I couldn’t help but think about these contested grounds, and what would happen if the Pearces came across a climber.

I knew the possibility for tension was high. For months before visiting, I’d been speaking with sources — including climbers themselves, residents and scientists — while reading more than 1,200 pages of documents detailing conflicts between rock climbers, neighbours, environmental organizations and government agencies about this slice of escarpment. 

Several document packages made accessible through freedom of information legislation and either obtained by or shared with The Narwhal show a paper trail of a conflict that goes far beyond squabbles between neighbours and climbers. It shows how the actions — or inactions — of Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks have allowed the situation to deteriorate so dramatically.

The most recent chapter of this story dates back to May 2023, when Ontario Parks, which falls under the provincial Environment Ministry, put up signs closing several climbing routes in particularly ecologically sensitive areas in Devil’s Glen. That summer, climbers spoke with news outlets, posted on social media, wrote blogs to criticize the “unprecedented” decision and, according to one of the document packages, emailed Ontario Parks staff to say the move was taken in “bad faith.”

By August that year, the documents show, the office of then-environment minister David Piccini had ordered all the remaining signs be removed — even though at least one government biologist argued removing the signs had “no scientific rationale.” Climbing has continued indiscriminately in the park since. Ontario Parks did not respond to a request for comment or specific questions for this story.

Creating a rock-climbing route is a fairly invasive procedure. Climbers use folding saws, garden shears and crowbars to pry off loose and wiggly rocks. In a detailed guide to “Route Building 101,” the Association of West Kootenay Rock Climbers in B.C. reminds climbers: “Bushes and small trees that stick out of cracks need to have the roots removed to avoid future growth. Hacking away at small stumps with a hatchet might be necessary.” Other advice is to use an “old ice axe” to remove roots from the cracks. Climbers use battery-powered hammer drills to affix bolts to the cliff face to clip on to — permanent anchors to catch them if they fall. 

The Narwhal spoke with Mike Penney, volunteer president of the Ontario Alliance of Climbers, about these concerns. He’s been targeted for disputing Ontario Parks’ efforts to close some areas off to climbing, and shared photos of posters in which his likeness is shown arguing about the scientific evidence behind those closures. The posters were shared on social media and, he said, left on the vehicles of climbers. “I’m not denying that there is an impact to our natural environment through climbing,” he says. “But I would argue that climbing has the least amount of impact out of any recreational sport that you could think of.”

The Pearces don’t agree with that assessment. They say they’ve seen sensitive plants ripped from the cliff face, tree limbs sawed off and a path built with gravel chipped off the side of the cliffs to allow for easier access. With more than 140 rock-climbing routes across the approximately 700 metres of escarpment within the park, they became increasingly worried about the ecosystem — the hundreds of bats that pour from caves and cracks in the fall and cedars that sprout from cliff faces in ways that seem to defy nature.

It made them de facto vigilantes. “We watched them start vandalizing the cliff and we reported it numerous times to Ontario Parks,” Pearce said, as we looked up at a route. Climbers are fond of quirky monikers, giving routes names such as Mystery of a Lost History, Hyperion and Sympathy for the Devil.

“Holly and I would come across them and say, ‘What are you doing? What’s going on? You’re not allowed to do that.’ And they tell us to mind our own business,” Pearce said. 

In turn, the Pearces have been accused by climbers of destroying routes, stealing equipment and egging cars — all of which they deny.

“We never thought that it would affect us on a level that it has,” Pearce said, saying the couple has received calls in the middle of the night with people threatening to burn their house down. “[The Ontario Provincial Police] told me I should always have a body cam walking in the park.”

The Ontario Provincial Police said it was unable to comment on detailed questions from The Narwhal about the number of calls for service, investigative actions or whether charges have been laid.

Over the years, the Pearces have sent more than 100 emails and made dozens of phone calls to Ontario Parks. In response, in 2026, the provincial agency issued them a cease and desist letter for excessive emails, phone calls and social media posts, which the ministry said are “inappropriate and serve no constructive purpose.” The consequences of breaking the cease and desist order were not specified, but the Pearces have continued emailing park staff.

To the Pearces, the letter is another roadblock in understanding how recreation and conservation are being balanced in the park — if they are at all.

“We’re not trying to say there shouldn’t be rock climbing,” Pearce said. “All we are asking for is that Ontario Parks does their job.”

A month after the Pearces were told to cease and desist, the Parks department issued a new management plan explicitly permitting climbing in Devil’s Glen. The plan, issued under current Environment Minister Todd McCarthy, states climbing “will be secondary to the protection of the cliff’s important geological, biological and cultural heritage,” and that a “leave no trace ethic” will act as the guiding principle. 

The plan sets out broad protections for the park, but doesn’t include details on how they’ll be enforced. As a “non-operating” park, there is no permanent office or on-site superintendent at Devil’s Glen. The plan does say park authorities can put up fencing and signs to keep climbers off particularly sensitive areas — again.

Derek Morningstar said he first visited Devil’s Glen in 2024, after being invited by an Ontario Parks specialist to research bats in the area. “We could tell right away that that was a pretty important place for bats,” the ecologist and founder of the bat research company Myotistar said in an interview. “There’s a huge amount of bats flying along there during the swarming season, and there are crevices and caves we think that haven’t been explored. Certainly they’re swarming there and probably hibernating there as well — several endangered species.”

Six of the province’s eight bat species have been found in the area, many of which are currently listed as endangered thanks to widespread fungal disease and habitat loss. This includes the eastern small-footed myotis and little brown bats, whose numbers have declined significantly in recent years.

In an April 2025 email contained in one of the document packages, Morningstar wrote to Ron Gould, an ecologist and protected areas specialist at Ontario Parks also studying the Devil Glen’s ecosystem. He shared his observations with the Parks staffer saying the location was one of the most significant swarming sites he had ever worked at: “It seems like during the swarming season, bats are just about everywhere in that area.”

His findings supported what Ontario Parks scientists had found, and sought to protect back in 2023 when the agency erected signs prohibiting climbing at 23 of the park’s existing routes. The signs went up in three sensitive areas that housed rare ferns, roosting bats and cliff-nesting birds across a 100-metre length of the escarpment in the park, a fraction of the climbable cliff face.

Gould said he was unable to give comment for this story due to fear of reprisal, but the documents contain an email he sent to his boss, Greg Wilson, the southwest zone manager for Ontario Parks, in May 2023. “These protection areas still leave a significant climbing opportunity,” wrote Gould, who has worked with species at risk and habitat protection at provincial agencies for more than two decades. 

For the Pearces, the signs were a win. But, the move was unpopular with climbers. In May 2023, Penney, with the Ontario Alliance of Climbers, wrote an email to Ontario Parks staff saying, “We are extremely disturbed by this development.” 

“If this is official signage, this is a statement by Ontario Parks that there is no longer any interest in ongoing communication, or a consultative relationship with the climbing community.”

Parks manager Wilson also declined to be interviewed for this story. But emails show his reply to Penney: “The signage was installed by Ontario Parks to protect the most sensitive ecological values in Devil’s Glen Provincial Park. … The intention of the signage is to notify park visitors that these areas should not be disturbed. We are still very much interested in an open and collaborative relationship with the [alliance].”

Things didn’t quite play out that way. 

“We realized that we actually needed to mobilize the climbing community,” Penney told The Narwhal. In an attempt to get the environment minister’s attention, the group solicited nearly 4,000 letters, he said, to reopen climbing in all areas of the park.

In his interview with The Narwhal, Penney said Ontario Parks had closed “the entirety of Devil’s Glen to rock climbing” in 2023. When The Narwhal asked about the discrepancy between that statement and Ontario Parks records showing only 23 routes of 140 routes had been closed, he replied: “I don’t really see why that matters,” adding the route count was incorrect, and that substantially more than 23 routes were closed. 

Penney said he used to spend 30 to 50 days each year climbing at Devil’s Glen. He loves the blue-ish grey limestone and the challenging routes. “One of the privileges in walking through these places is also learning about the environment and learning about some of the species that you’re now walking in amongst,” Penney said over the phone while driving home from his day job as a business development manager for a soup company.

He said he visits the area less now, given escalated tensions. He told The Narwhal that climbers have described being threatened, called racial slurs, filmed while relieving themselves in the woods and having the bolts they use to fasten themselves to the cliffs cut off.

He told The Narwhal about an email he received in his role at the alliance, sent from Adam Pearce to the climbers and other stakeholders in September 2025: “Let me be crystal clear: there will be hell to pay in Devil’s Glen if climbing access is granted.” But Pearce told The Narwhal this was taken out of context and was only part of the picture. The Narwhal reviewed the email, which read in full: “Let me be crystal clear: there will be hell to pay in Devil’s Glen if climbing access is granted without full transparency and accountability. The community will not tolerate policy built on silence and spin.” 

After the “No Climbing” signs went up in spring 2023, some of them were vandalized, according to an email from Wilson contained in a freedom of information package. Meanwhile, climbers’ protest letters flooded in and, in May 2023, Ministry of Environment staff had a meeting with representatives from the Ontario Alliance of Climbers. There, according to the minutes, Penney raised concerns about the “continued involvement” of unnamed Ontario Parks staff members and proposed bringing in third-party biologists to validate the agency’s science.

When asked about this by The Narwhal, Penney criticized the research done by Ontario Parks’ ecologists. He said he could not be more specific about the methodology or scope, as the alliance hadn’t actually seen the ministry’s research informing the closure decision, but said the route count Ontario Parks used when planning the closures was incorrect.

Within a few months, internal emails show, then-environment minister Piccini’s office specifically directed Ontario Parks to remove the signs. Soon after that, Gould raised concerns.

Weeks after the signs came down, Gould wrote to Wilson and other colleagues that he had received reports of climbers developing new routes in Devil’s Glen and “installing new bolts directly within our previously posted protection areas.”

In October, Gould wrote: “There has been no scientific rationale involved in the removal of the signed protection areas so hopefully we can get those back in place soon. These ongoing climbing activities within the sensitive areas are likely to cause further user conflicts and impacts to park values, both of which should be avoided in our protected areas.”

About a year later, records show Gould was told by his manager, Wilson, to postpone work at the park. “As a reminder, it is my expectation you will consult with me and receive approval from me prior to performing any work related to Devil’s Glen,” Wilson wrote in a September 2024 response to an email from Gould with subject line, “Trip safety plan for Devil’s Glen and [redacted].” Wilson continued that he “would like to hold on this work for the time being,” and added he was working to get an update on the proposed amendment to the park management plan.

Wilson did not respond to questions about why signs were removed, or whether Parks biologists were asked to hold off on work at Devil’s Glen.

Ontario Parks did not confirm whether Gould still worked on the Devil’s Glen file at the time of writing, and The Narwhal has since learned he was dismissed from his work at the agency altogether. An email sent to him on Oct. 6, bounced back, saying his account was not found on the Ontario government’s email service. He was the only protected areas specialist listed for Devil’s Glen and the larger southwest parks zone on Ontario Parks’ website.

Around the time Gould was directed to hold off of work at the park, in fall 2024, a member of the alliance’s Facebook page posted that they’d heard of a climber being “approached aggressively close and made to feel uncomfortable by a man and a woman” saying climbing was not allowed on a route in Devil’s Glen. 

Penney responded, encouraging climbers to use all portions of the park and adjacent Crown land, saying: “Climbing is permitted at Devil’s Glen Provincial Park, on the entirety of the cliff.” He wrote that climbing was allowed and encouraged by Ontario Parks and the Ontario Alliance of Climbers. “Please please please continue to climb at [Devil’s Glen], enjoy yourself.”

Penney wrote to The Narwhal in an Oct. 7, email saying, “We recognize that there are legitimate conservation concerns and strongly support responsible environmental stewardship. The concern is that the conflict has, in our view, escalated beyond a normal policy disagreement.”

The Niagara Escarpment stretches from western New York, through southern Ontario and curves around Georgian Bay and the Bruce Peninsula before heading back south to parts of Michigan and Wisconsin. Devil’s Glen sits along its eastern portion in Ontario, a part of the important, delicate ecosystem that researchers and Ontario Parks officials have understood the importance of protecting for decades.

Among those experts is Doug Larson, a retired researcher and University of Guelph professor, who began studying North America’s escarpments in the 1980s.

“We found trees that were almost 10 times older than anything found elsewhere in Ontario,” Larson said of the Niagara Escarpment, over the phone from his home in Guelph. “It really is the last undisturbed stand of forests in eastern North America because of the fact people can’t get to it.”

That is, unless they climb.

In his 2004 book about the ancient cliff face forests in the Niagara Escarpment, The Last Stand, Larson wrote about European immigrants who introduced rock climbing to the Niagara Escarpment after the Second World War. “Trees hundreds of years old came in direct contact with humans for the first time,” he wrote. 

Then, at the turn of the millenium, the advent of indoor climbing gyms and advances in climbing equipment made rock climbing more accessible and popular than ever. It spread across the escarpment. “Sawn stumps and branches are visual reminders that the climbers have not simply chosen rock with fewer trees,” Larson wrote.

The twisted trees, mostly cedars, cling to the face of the escarpment. Standing only one to three metres tall, with trunks as wide as a person’s leg, they may look stunted compared to the towering stereotype of old-growth forests, particularly in B.C. But, Larson said, they represent the oldest undisturbed forest ecosystem this side of the Rocky Mountains. And they’re a biodiversity hotspot, important for nesting birds and endangered mammals. A 2008 study by an Ontario Parks ecologist found Devil’s Glen has an “outstanding total of nine provincially rare” plants including male fern, smooth cliff-brake and green spleenwort.

Through the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, Larson’s research found climbed areas supported substantially fewer plants due to trampling, purposeful removal and soil compaction. He and his teams recommended new climbing routes be banned in protected areas. 

Not everyone was a fan. Ontario Rock Climbing, a website that sells climbing gear, published a post on the history of climbing in the province that references a 1991 study by Larson and colleagues. 

“This study had a very negative impact on the climbing community,” it read, calling this period the “Dark Ages” for outdoor climbing. “Although the results from the study were inconsistent, it led to … a number of other cliffs being closed to climbing. Public opinion became that climbing was not compatible with the Niagara Escarpment.”

Larson argued “there was nothing inconsistent” about his results: “We published that 30 years ago, and we got immediately despised by the climbing community because they didn’t like our story.”

“Climbers need to realize that some restrictions may be required to preserve the cliff face forest in perpetuity,” he wrote in 2004. “One of the main problems is that climbers have had free rein of the escarpment cliffs for over 50 years … it is extremely difficult to modify behaviour that has been entrenched for such a long period of time.”

Alerted by the Pearces, the conservation organization Ontario Nature has also taken an interest in Devil’s Glen. Conservation director Tony Morris said his organization isn’t debating whether climbing and nature can coexist, but whether efforts are actually being made to strike that balance.

“It’s about managing that activity in a way that doesn’t harm those sensitive ecological features,” Morris said. “It means not having just climbing routes appear all over the place, and ensuring climbers aren’t going into areas that bats are hibernating in and aren’t tying ropes off of cedars, 100-year-old cedar trees.”

Having also viewed one of the document packages before sharing it with The Narwhal, Morris said seeing expert staff seemingly being held back from monitoring ecosystems “raises some serious questions about the mandate of Ontario Parks” and about the management of other parks and beyond.

“If park ecologists, whose job it is to monitor ecological health of parks, aren’t allowed to visit the parks, that seems strange,” Morris said. He said he has struggled to get information from the Environment Ministry about internal scientific studies done at Devil’s Glen.

“This is just such a strange situation that it’s gone this far,” Morris said. “When you combine it with what else we’re seeing across the province in terms of attacks on natural heritage. It’s part of a bigger picture, in the sense that, even the areas that are supposed to be managed primarily for ecological integrity, it raises serious questions if that’s the case anymore.”

In 2025, two years after the ‘no climbing’ signs were put up and quickly removed, the Ministry of Environment posted a notice to amend the Devil’s Glen Provincial Park management plan on the provincial environmental registry, and opened it up for public comment. The amendment included listing rock climbing as a permitted use in the park. 

More than 600 comments were submitted. Over 90 per cent supported the proposal, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and managing rock climbing within the park. A minority expressed concerns about environmental impacts on cliff habitats and species such as ancient cedar trees and bats.

In April 2026, climbing became a permitted use in the park.

“Ecological integrity remains the top priority, and Ontario Parks will manage ecologically sustainable recreational uses and rock climbing at Devil’s Glen Provincial Park with ecological integrity in mind,” the decision reads.

The Ontario Alliance of Climbers credits this to their campaigning. One of its websites describes this regulation change as “the first such plan for an Ontario Provincial Park,” adding, “We are optimistic that this will be the first of many such plans. We need you, the climbing community, to write submissions supporting this plan … we are so close to clipping the chains.”

“I have a great relationship with Greg Wilson,” Penney told The Narwhal in mid-September about the alliance’s “productive conversations” with the Environment Ministry. “And they agreed that this was something that was long overdue, and put their support behind some resources to help Ontario Parks and help our partners there do what was necessary internally.” 

Penney told The Narwhal that “climbers are great stewards and advocates of our lands and of our climbing areas.”

When The Narwhal visited Devil’s Glen in August, shiny metal bolts were visible across the cliff face. There were no signs telling climbers which sensitive areas to avoid, even though Ontario Parks’ plan sanctioning climbing references a study that “recommended restricting climbing and access routes to the most disturbed areas where continued use is not likely to worsen existing impacts.”

The plan gives Ontario Parks the right to close routes deemed sensitive to climbing activity, and to prevent new routes from being established given that cliff area is “highly saturated … and the need or capacity to create new route opportunities is generally low.”

As we walked, the Pearces picked up garbage from the trail, stashing it in their backpack to throw out later. “You better wash your hands after,” Holly told her husband as he bent toward a personal hygiene product.

After about half hour of hiking, we came across two climbers, readying their gear and resting between routes. They were the only other people using the trail on the quiet Monday morning, and my stomach dropped, anticipating conflict. Holly, too, had readied her phone camera to capture the interaction. The climbers and Pearces exchanged polite, short greetings — remarking on the beautiful, mild weather.

Holly put her phone away. The climbers, now with full permission from Ontario Parks, surveyed their next climb.

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