Australia to Ban Climbing on Uluru

Australia is set to ban climbing on its iconic Uluru sandstone rock formation, beginning in October 2019, the BBC reported Wednesday. The famed 141-foot-tall red outcrop, long known as Ayers Rock, has become a popular tourist destination despite being a sacred site for Aboriginal Australians. “It is an extremely important place, not a playground or theme park like Disneyland,” Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Board Chairman Sammy Wilson, an Anangu man himself, explained. “If I travel to another country and there is a sacred site, an area of restricted access, I don’t enter or climb it, I respect it.”