In an unprecedented year, Friends of Cedar Mesa’s Visit with Respect Ambassador and Stewardship & Monitoring programs are rising to meet new challenges. With the pandemic pushing more people to public lands, these programs are more important than ever, especially as we see increased visitation and additional vandalism in the Bears Ears region. Earlier this year, our staff and volunteers discovered charcoal graffiti within a site and damage to a historic inscription along Butler Wash.
Our volunteers serve as eyes and ears on the ground, helping to report and reduce incidents of vandalism and inadvertent damage to sites as well as providing essential tools for visitor education.
For the past five years, FCM has worked with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to develop a site stewardship program in Utah. The long-term goal was to grow the program beyond the BLM to other land management agencies and even work with private landowners.
In 2020, the Utah state legislature passed HB 163 creating a state-run Cultural Site Stewardship Program. Since then, the Utah State Historic Preservation Office has developed and implemented the Utah Cultural Site Stewardship (UCSS) program. FCM is proud to have helped lay the foundation for this new program and to see many of the tools we developed, including our site stewardship manual, be incorporated into the UCSS materials. We are thrilled to continue our stewardship work under the state!
FCM Volunteers outside of the Bears Ears Education Center.
In 2021, FCM expanded Site Stewardship in the Bears Ears region by becoming the Regional Stewardship Coordinator for lands managed by the US Forest Service, State Institutional and Trust Lands Administration (SITLA), and National Park Service. Meanwhile, we continue to work closely with the Edge of the Cedars Museum to mentor and manage site stewards for the BLM.
While training volunteers for the Utah Cultural Site Stewardship Program, FCM added 15 new stewards to the program who will help monitor sites. Overall, and despite challenges posed by the Covid pandemic, 36 stewards monitored 53 sites this year, dedicated nearly 700 hours, and drove more than 13,000 miles to reach their sites.
Beyond the work carried out by Site Stewards, FCM’s Visit with Respect Ambassadors also serve as a critical resource for cultural site preservation and are an important tool in educating the public how to respectfully visit cultural sites. FCM’s Visit with Respect Ambassadors have been busy as visitation to the Bears Ears region has increased to well over half a million people annually.
In fact, two Ambassadors, who spent an afternoon at a popular site chatting with visitors, recorded 104 visitors over a 3-hour period and provided educational information to dozens of people. In another instance, Ambassadors identified and reported vandalism to a historic signature, which someone attempted to remove. Thanks to their sharp eyes, we were able to use the incident to educate visitors about the importance of leaving graffiti removal to the professionals to prevent accidental erasure of the past.
Visit with Respect Ambassadors are some of our most effective educational tools in protecting this landscape. Many people don’t know how to visit cultural and scientific sites like cliff dwellings, rock imagery panels, dinosaur fossils, and historic structures respectfully. The VWR Ambassador program, in partnership with the BLM, offers a positive response to damage caused by uneducated visitors. This year, FCM worked with 12 very active VWR Ambassadors who spent 582 hours on the trails, visited 36 different sites, and educated 587 people while out on the landscape.
BLM Archaeologist Jared Lundell removing charcoal graffiti at a cultural site.
Friends of Cedar Mesa’s Stewardship & Monitoring and Visit with Respect Ambassador programs are cornerstones of FCM’s work and the dedication and care by our many volunteers is why we are able to have the impact we do. If you would like to join our cadre of friendly faces on the land, contact Wanda Raschkow at