I received a phone call a few minutes ago from Mary Estes, who is the
Resource Protection Specialist for the State Historic Preservation
Office (SHPO) of Arizona State Parks. She has the overall responsibility
for all the Site Stewards in Arizona.
 
We spoke at length about some of the recent issues that have surfaced,
including the Deer Valley Rock Art Center (DVRAC) virtual cache, and the
Goat Camp Cache
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?ID=648). I tried to
express, and I believe Mary understands, my concerns about both of these
situations. I believe I also understand her concerns. 
 
On DVRAC, I can assure you that Mary understands the difference between
a virtual and a physical cache. But Mary came away from the first land
managers' meeting last September with the understanding that the land
managers wanted cachers to obtain permission for placing ALL caches,
physical or virtual. I do not recall that explicitly being stated at
that meeting. At the same time, being a cacher, I would probably have
interpreted the phrase "all caches" to mean "all physical caches", but
non-cachers could understandably fail to make that distinction.
 
At the second land managers' meeting in January, we all agreed to hold
another meeting in September of this year, although we will not start
planning that meeting until June. I told Mary that I intend to make the
topic of virtual caches an agenda item at that time. I think that if we
have the opportunity to explain virtual caches to that audience, we will
be able to exempt them from any permission requirements, as long as the
virtual locations don't threaten archaeological sites.
 
Moving on to Goat Camp, I pointed out that not a single land management
agency has yet to post any set of rules for caching or cache placement
on the Web, in spite of requests that they do so. During the
conversation, I came to the conclusion that there had been a different
kind of miscommunication. I believe Mary was under the impression that
we were going to post the rules somewhere, or that the agencies would
get them posted either on geocaching.com or azgeocaching. com. As a
result of this phone call, she sees the need for the land management
agencies to post the rules on their respective web sites. She offered to
contact all the land managers herself and repeat this request, and
explain to them why it was necessary for it to be on their sites. I in
turn agreed to be a collection point for the land managers. When they
have posted their rules, they will email me the links to their rules
pages. Once I have a good number of them, I'll forward them on to Brian
and Jason at azgeocaching.com, and I assume and hope they will be able
to set up a links section for this on the azgeocaching.com site. It will
then be up to all of us to spread the word about that central source.
 
Yes, there are Site Stewards within SHPO who seem as though they will
not be satisfied until all Geocaching is eradicated. But we also know
there are Site Stewards who are Geocachers themselves.  I do believe
that as long as we keep working with SHPO and the land managers we will
be able to develop ways to continue caching on our public lands without
jeopardizing our historical heritage.
 
Steve
Team Tierra Buena