A fungal infection known as White Nose Syndrome (WNS) is killing bats by the millions across the U.S. In June 2025, the National Park Service confirmed its presence on both sides of the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP).
“This was the first time [WNS] was detected in Grand County,” Kyle Patterson, the public affairs officer for RMNP, told GearJunkie. “Which shows the progression of the disease in Colorado.”
Bats are elusive creatures by nature, making diseases like WNS hard to study. Luckily, a group of climbers has stepped up to help bat biologists gather important data. Climbers for Bat Conservation (CBC) is a Colorado State University program that enlists rock climbers to report bat sightings made in the wild. The climbers’ data could help conservation biologists like CBC director Robert Schorr learn about the disease, and potentially mitigate its spread.
“Climbers are about the only recreational group that ever sees bats where they’re naturally roosting,” Schorr told GearJunkie. “They see bats in cracks that they’re selecting, and at heights where they’ve chosen to [roost]. I rarely get to see that, and I’m the one who studies bats.”
CBC has been steadily growing since the group was created in 2014. Now, Schorr is getting reports from climbers around the world. His dataset is growing, and with it so is his power to understand how WNS and other diseases are affecting bat populations like those in RMNP.
White Nose Syndrome in the Park
RMNP is home to nine species of bats, according to Patterson. All of them are important to the health of their ecosystems. Some bats act as pollinators, she said, and they all feed on insects like mosquitoes, helping control their populations. Schorr hesitates to call bats a true “keystone species” but admits they aren’t far off.
Since its discovery in 2006, WNS has killed an estimated 6.4 million bats in North America. It’s an infection caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (PD). PD thrives in cold, sheltered environments like those where bats tend to hibernate — in caves, rock crevices, and cracks. So WNS usually infects bats when they’re most vulnerable.
According to Schorr, bats with WNS develop white fuzz around their noses and mouths (hence the name). They dehydrate and lose fluids, often waking up from hibernation to look for food.
“But in the winter, there are no insects available,” Schorr explains, “so they end up starving.”
In May 2024, RMNP rangers announced that they’d discovered PD in the park. So in June 2025, when park staff tested three dead bats they’d discovered, it surprised neither Schorr nor the National Park Service that WNS was the culprit.
“Our information comes so slowly and incrementally from studying bats that this fungus is probably in areas that we don’t know about simply because we haven’t been able to sample the bats in those areas,” Schorr said. And the first step to sampling bat populations for WNS is learning where they are. That’s where Climbers for Bat Conservation has become an essential piece of the puzzle.
Climbers for Bat Conservation: Get Involved
Much of Schorr’s work deals with tracking bats and bat populations. When we spoke, he’d just returned from Wyoming, where he was using “passive integrated transponder tags” (the same chips used to track pets) to track bats and monitor their feeding habits. He does the same to study WNS and other threatening diseases.
When Schorr started talking with climbers around 2014, he pretty quickly realized how useful they could be for his research. If he could develop a system where climbers reported bat sightings, he could build a more thorough and accurate map of where these elusive creatures live. In the years since, the success of the program has blown him away.
“Climbers have been phenomenal in their interest and excitement about this project,” he said. “We now have nearly 400 records from as far away as Kenya, Bulgaria, and Italy.”
According to him, biologists are learning new things about bat ecology directly because of the CBC’s work.
Participation requires no membership or sign-up. If you’re a climber and you find bats while you’re climbing, all you have to do is go to the CBC website and press “Submit a Sighting.” Fill out the survey and attach a photo of the bats you saw. Then, if you want, CBC will send you a free T-shirt as a thank you.
No Closures in RMNP Due to Sick Bats
When asked if the discovery of WNS has ever affected outdoor recreation, Schorr rattled off a couple of examples of caves or climbing areas being shut down, but he said that’s pretty abnormal. He said the discovery of WNS usually doesn’t affect recreation.
NPS told GearJunkie that it is not planning any closures to recreational areas as a result of confirming WNS in the park. However, it asked that visitors refrain from handling bats, whether dead or alive, and immediately report any dead bats they find to park staff.
“If visitors do visit caves or mines elsewhere on their trip, be sure to decontaminate clothing and equipment to slow the spread of this disease,” Patterson added.
RMNP is continuing to monitor its bat populations in collaboration with the Colorado Natural Heritage Program as it has since 2019. While WNS is an ominous discovery, Patterson still seemed hopeful about the potential outcomes for RMNP’s bats.
“It is too early to know the details of the future trajectory of bat populations in the park,” Patterson said. “The disease spreads more easily in caves used for hibernation; with no substantial caves in the park, the mortality rate may be less severe in [RMNP].”
Time will tell. For now, if you’re climbing in RMNP and run into a family of bats, the best thing you can do is report it to Climbers for Bat Conservation to help biologists expand their population map.
Read the full article here
