Message

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.