Today I attended a meeting held by the State Historic Preservation
Office of the Arizona State Parks Department. I had been invited by Mary
Estes, the Resource Protection Specialist, and the person who did so
much to make last September's meeting happen.
This meeting was a regularly scheduled event held for the Site Steward
Regional Coordinators. It was also attended by many representatives from
land management agencies, including NPS, USFS, BLM, State Parks, State
Land Department, Maricopa County Parks, City of Phoenix, and there may
have been one or two others I've simply overlooked in writing this.
Altogether there were about two dozen people present. Mary had asked me
to present a review of what's been happening between the Arizona
Geocaching Community and the land management agencies since the
September meeting.
I spoke about what's been happening with the liaisons, the Geo-Mentoring
initiative, and the upcoming training being conducted at Tonto National
Forest. I also invited them to check out both geocaching.com and
azgeocaching.com, and to register on either or both if it would benefit
them. The main reason I encouraged them to open accounts is because if
there is a problem with a cache an email from the agency would likely be
much more effective than an email from a "concerned cacher". We may well
have some of those folks reading this listserver now.
I also talked about some of the issues associated with the growth
Geocaching has been experiencing, and the fact that we have no formal
organization. I think everyone there understands that we don't have
control over what individual cachers do, but they do want us to help out
if we visit a cache and realize that it's in a prohibited or restricted
area by noting that in the logs. One type of cache where we could be
particularly attentive is on multis where the first stage coordinates
aren't a problem, but the final cache location might turn out to be
somewhere it shouldn't be.
My general sense continues that most of the agencies have no fundamental
opposition to Geocaching. More than anything, they want people placing
caches on these lands to obtain permission first. That also helps ensure
we don't accidentally place a cache near an archaeological site. We need
to do what we can to work within this; it's our rule as well.
There remain concerns from the Site Stewards over individual caches
which are either known to be or appear to be near archaeological sites.
That number is down to about five, but time did not permit us to discuss
them individually.
We agreed to hold another meeting in September to review things and to
decide at that time if we needed to meet on a regularly scheduled basis.
That meeting will be more like the original one, with several Geocachers
invited to attend. Mary and I will start setting that up around June.
Steve
Team Tierra Buena
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