Uluru / Ayers Rock

When Australia returned ownership of Uluru to the Anangu people in 1985, the traditional owners immediately asked visitors to stop climbing their sacred rock. It took 34 more years, and a management plan stipulating closure once climber numbers dropped below 20 percent, before the ban finally took effect on October 26, 2019. The date was deliberate: exactly 34 years after the handback. What most visitors don’t realize is that the 550-million-year-old sandstone monolith they see rising from the desert was tilted 90 degrees by tectonic forces, meaning they’re actually looking at ancient seabed standing on its edge.

For three and a half decades, the request was simply ignored by enough people that a sign asking politely wasn’t going to cut it. Climbing numbers fell anyway, gradually, as visitors absorbed what they were being told: that scaling Uluru was roughly equivalent to climbing on the roof of a church. By 2015 the figure had dropped below the threshold the board had set five years earlier, which meant the closure was no longer a matter of if but exactly when. They picked the date with the same patience the rock itself has shown for half a billion years, waiting for the anniversary to make the point unmissable.