Larry gave an excellent summary of
the nights meeting.
I meet with the representative from the Salt River Indian Community. Her concerns were the same as those quoted by Chelby Geiss with her meeting with Gila River. The Salt River tribe will not allow any geocaches on their communtiy..with one exception..they have their commercial district near the Scottsdale Pavilions, just west of the Freeway. They don’t really mind a cache placement so long as it along the narrow commercial strip that follows the freeway. Please do not place any caches on ANY of their rural lands.
I then meet an Archeologist from the Tonto National forest. He was VERY supportive of Geocaching and actually encouraged VIRTUAL caches at some archeological sites. He though my sign from the past IV was a great idea and asked me to call him later because he had some other sites he would like posted as virtual caches. HOORAY for the Tonto National Forrest!!!
After talking to the Tonto National Forrest representative I had an interesting talk with Shelly Rasmussen and Mary Estes from the land steward program. I agreed to remove two of my caches that specifically direct cachers to petroglyph sites. I understand their concern about archeological sites possibly being vandalized and unintentional damage in caused by people looking for an actual geocaches at the site.
During this meeting with Shelly and Mary it was brought to my attention that another one of my geocaches was located near an archeological site. When placing this geocache I was unaware that there were any sites of archeological significance nearby. This site is a very popular spot for people to visit and the state has spent the over $100,000 to rebuild a structure that has some minor significance in Arizona history. My geocache is about 20 feet from the rebuilt structure and Shelly was adamant in that the geocache be removed. I pointed out to Shelly that the state had spent a very large sum of money to specifically encourage visitors to this site and that my geocache was serving the same exact purpose. Shelly was unwavering and her opinion and fanatical about the removal of the cache. Shelly's stance made absolute no sense to me on how the state could spend over $100,000 to encourage people to visit the this site and my geocache, serving the same purpose, was somehow adversely impacting the site. After this meeting my head was spinning. One organization was commanding me on encouraging people to visit their archeological sites and another one was criticizing me for the same thing.
As a side note, the infamous “A Sign From The Past III”, was returned to me. It was passed around at the meeting to give the various land representatives an opportunity to examine an actual geocache. As for the geocaches at the meeting they wanted to log it as a find when it became their opportunity to examine the cache ;-) I'm not sure what to do with this cache that is now part of Arizona history and am debating whether to put it back into circulation.
My overall impression of the meeting was that the majority of people supported responsible geocaching. This was a great meeting that opened up numerous lines of communications and I would like to thank Steve Gross for all of his efforts in making this happen.