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Mine was a gentle overhang pocked with shallow depressions, among the easiest routes in the park. No need for a 5-inch-thick pad to soften my landing, I thought. After all, I'm only a few feet off the ground.

I clung to the gritty granite, struggling against gravity until my grip on a thin ledge failed and I fell to a flat slanting rock below, landing on my keister on the desert floor.

My climbing partners for the day -- a group of Aussies from Perth and climbing junkies from Colorado -- barely looked up at the sound of my thud. Falling from boulders is part of the fun in Hueco Tanks. In fact, it's a privilege. This 860-acre park -- a protrusion of sun-burned boulders in the middle of the Chihuahuan desert east of El Paso -- ranks among the top two or three bouldering sites in the world.

Hueco Tanks climbing routes

The climbing routes, or "problems," at Hueco Tanks are usually named by the first person to successfully complete the route. And because rock climbers are a colorful bunch, the names they give the problems are also colorful. Here are a few examples:

* Shaved Pitts (rated V1 on the "V" scale of 0 to 16)

* Five o'Clock Shadow (V2)

* Root Canal (V2)

* Springtime for Hitler (V5)

* Mexican Love Handle (V2)

* Bloody Flapper (V4)

* Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive (V2)

Since the sport's popularity began to surge about 10 years, bouldering enthusiasts have descended on Hueco (pronounced Way-co) Tanks like ants to a picnic. The boulders, some the size of school buses, others the size of skyscrapers, are pocked with millions of huecos (Spanish for hollows), created during a magma eruption 35 million years ago. The winter weather is usually mild -- with high temperatures around 60 degrees -- ideal conditions for winter climbing, considered the best time to scale desert rocks.

But there is more to Hueco Tanks than climbing. This lumpy outcropping of pockmarked rocks is adorned with more than 2,000 pictographs and petroglyphs from Native Americans who have been visiting here since 8,000 BC to draw water from the pools that form in the ubiquitous hollows. The park represents one of the largest collections of Indian rock art in North America and annually draws hundreds of historians, educators and fans of Native American culture.

Thus the problem for Texas park officials: How do you preserve historic Indian rock art while accommodating visitors who come from as far away as Europe and Australia to climb on those same rocks?

In mid-November, just as temperatures in West Texas dropped to comfortable levels, I flew into El Paso with climbing shoes in my backpack to experience the park that draws climbers and history buffs from around the world, and to see whether such divergent groups of visitors can coexist on this tiny island of pitted rock.

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From a satellite photo, Hueco Tanks looks like three wrinkly mounds of sun-baked clay surrounded by a flat stretch of shrub-strewn desert. The mounds are dubbed North Mountain, West Mountain and East Mountain, with a small spur protruding from East Mountain.

On the ground, the park appears as a stony oasis, festooned with juniper and oak trees jutting from a parched stretch of cactus-strewn desert. The hub of activity is at the park headquarters, a cramped stucco building, no bigger than an RV at the main entrance. This is where I started the first day of my visit, with reservations to join a rock climbing tour. Reservations are crucial, I learned.

To help protect the rock art and better supervise the climbers, the state adopted a management plan 10 years ago that imposed a daily limit of 230 people. Of those, 160 people can visit the East and West Mountains but only if accompanied by a guide. Seventy other visitors can wander unsupervised around North Mountain. Before the restrictions were added, the park drew about 150,000 visitors a year. That number is now down to about 28,000.

Corey Dwan, a veteran climbing guide from Crested Butte, Colo., was leading six climbers from Colorado and Australia into East Mountain. He agreed to let me tag along. These were experienced climbers and world travelers who talked about Hueco Tanks the way surfers extol the virtues of Oahu's North Shore.

"The quality of the rock is just so solid and it tends to be more overhanging so it tends to lead to more difficult problems and the setting is just beautiful," Dwan said later from atop a giant igloo-shaped boulder.

When we got to our first bouldering spot, a place called the "Warm Up Roof," I understood why they called the routes "problems." Serious climbers do not scramble up a rock face on a whim. They study the pocks and indentations with the thoughtfulness of a mathematician. They plan each maneuver beforehand and discuss the options with fellow climbers.

And once they get on the rocks, they fall. Repeatedly.

The falling bodies were cushioned by 5-inch-thick pads called "crash pads." Rock climbing and bouldering are two different activities. I have scaled a few rocks in Yosemite and Joshua Tree national parks and the Red Rock Canyon area in Nevada, but I would classify myself as a novice.

Unlike rock climbers, who use harnesses and anchor ropes, bouldering enthusiasts climb 20 to 25 feet above the ground, at most, using only hands and feet. It sounds easy except that the toughest "problems" are usually on sheer vertical walls or overhangs that are nearly horizontal to the ground. (Bouldering problems are ranked in difficulty from 0 to 16 on a so-called "V" scale, named after climbing pioneer John "Vermin" Sherman.)

Near the "Warm Up Roof," the climbers took turns on a V-4 problem that ends with a steep pitch about 20 feet above the ground. The climbers cheered each other on and howled with disappointment when someone failed. And the consequences of failure can be painful.

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