[Az-Geocaching] Officially speaking....

[Chelby Geiss]

Excellent overview, Larry! I just want to ad a little something with 
regards to the Indian Reservations.
I spoke with the Land Use Ordinance Enforcement Officer with the Gila 
River Indian Community.  And she had excellent points that I completely 
agree with.  The Gila River Indian community is a sovereign 
nation...PRIVATE LAND!  And of course we must ask permission to place a 
cache on private land.  But, the majority of the reservation land has 
archaeological sites and/or are sacred sites!  These need to be 
respected!  She stated that the mountain ranges within their community 
are currently off limits.  She had a excellent point that all the 
mountains around Phoenix were and still are sacred to them. She 
understands that people enjoy visiting these, but she asks that we 
please respect their wishes in regards to the reservation land because 
that is all they have left!  And not trying to get into a "stealing the 
land from the Native Americans" fight...but she is right!
And if you need any more reason to stay off reservation land: if you 
are caught on the Gila River Reservation without the proper permit, you 
risk having anything of value confiscated...that includes your vehicle 
and your GPS! And then you will be prosecuted through their judicial 
system!
I am going to keep in contact with her.  Like Larry said they are not 
against geocaching. She was very interested in it...but we need to 
respect their wishes!  We have parks, cities, and forests to cache in.  
Their reservation is  372,000 acres...very small. In fact if you look 
at a map, the total area of all the reservations combined is not that 
large!

I also talked with the National Parks State Coordinator for Arizona.  
He is working to get a list of contacts for the various National Parks 
that we can put up on azgeocaching for everyone to use.  He was quick 
to point out that they have not had any problem with caches in 
Arizona(which he was very proud of), but that there has been problems 
elsewhere.  He said his people would be more than willing to work with 
someone who wanted to place a cache to assure that it was not 
threatening anything archaeological or environmental.  So I guess the 
point to make here yet again...JUST ASK!:)

There was talk of actually offering some training on how to spot 
archaeological sites because several people honestly didn't know their 
cache was on a site!  I think this is an AWESOME idea!  Arizona has 
something on the rest of the country in that we have a far greater 
number of archaeological sites.  Add to that the fact that many of us 
are not native Arizonans...we just don't know what to look for!  But 
then we got (what seemed to me) the run around from some of the Land 
Stewards:
-Shame on you for putting a cache on a site.
*But we didn't know it was a site. Can you please show us what to look 
for.
-No that's confidential.
Maybe I took that all wrong...but I kept running in that circle all 
last night after the meeting!

Well, I'm going to stop talking now...I know Steve is probably writing 
a huge summary of everything as we speak!:)

It was a very good meeting!
C:)
Team desertSol
Chelby & Kevin
+
Kiva and Lancer (German Shepherds)
Apache Junction, AZ
www.desertsol.com/~chelby/geocaching