EP6 Bonus Content œ A Conversation about Site Stewardship with Rob Elliot

My name is Rob Elliott. I'm the Regional Coordinator for the Verde River Region of the Arizona Site Stewardship Program. We work very closely with the Conservancy on monitoring their sites here in the Verde Valley, this being one that we're at today visiting. And we've got about 100 site stewards in the full team and in the Verde Region about 110 properties or sites that we monitor through the course of this area. Actually, I started my career in this field with the Friends of Cedar Mesa with their Ambassador Program. I had learned about the Arizona State Program at a, actually an arts fair in Camp Verde. They had a booth. I was working at the time and really didn't have the time to really spare to do this kind of work. Just couldn't get out that much. I was in my career, you know, full bore. And so I kind of put in the back of my head, you know, to look into after I got closer to retirement. The first thing I did is I met up with the Friends of Cedar Mesa in Bluff, Utah, and they have an Ambassador Program, which is very similar. And boy, you call them, you get signed up in about two weeks. You go through a couple of online training and you're an ambassador. The state's program takes a little longer. There's background checks involved. There's a number of different processes. There's a four-step process you need to follow. You need references. So it's much more involved. So that took longer. So I was actually an ambassador first, then came on as a site steward, just with basic locations to deal with and monitor. And then with the work I did with Friends of Cedar Mesa, they asked, would you want to be a site steward in Utah? And this would be, I monitor Bears Ears, Four Corners area, San Juan County, Cedar Mesa. And I said, well, sure. Really the sites up there need to only visit two, three times a year. And I'm up there easily two or three times a year. So I go up for say a week and camp out with my partners up there and we go monitor sites. And a lot of these are more back country than what we have here in Arizona, but very interesting. If you know that area, you know how interesting that is. And the history there is just astounding. And just the landscape is astounding. So that's kind of how it played out for me. Being a regional coordinator, as I kind of just moved through the process, they recognize me as being passionate enough to offer me that kind of position, which puts me in more connection with the broader range of stewards in the region, which I like doing. I'm a former leader in the work I used to do. And being a leader, helping people succeed in these kinds things is what I do now. And I really enjoy doing that. And if you like to hike about four days a week, I mean, that's available for you. You can hike every day of the week if you'd like to, or throttle it back and forth as you see fit. And being a volunteer position, you're not on a time clock. You're not going to get a review. You're not in that kind of realm. You get to go do what you want to do where you want to do it. And there's nothing better than that. So I always match stewards up when I assign sites and stewards to sites to locations that will really suit them the best, either close to their home, or if they like to get out in the back woods, we'll give them something in the back country. And the four-wheel drive to it, there's a broad range of people that do this kind of work. And they're all great. So it's fun to coordinate those kinds of things. I'm a retired architect. And when I got retired or became retired, I was looking for, you know, what do I want to do with myself? And I love the architecture, obviously. I'm drawn to that with this program. A lot of it, we have a lot of really interesting architecture here. And with that, I'm learning all sorts of other really interesting things about culture and preservation and society and how things work and how people live. And that's what architects do for a living. We need to know those things to be successful in what we do. So this is a really great fit for me. And if you like the outdoors, which I do, all aspects of that, hiking around, traveling, exploring, this suits me just great, right up my alley. And it's become a great passion for me. If any of these kind of things really appeal to you, it's a program that you ought to look into. We're always looking for good, passionate people that want to do this kind of work and help us preserve the history and support the indigenous cultures that were here, you know, thousands of years ago. The fact that when you study architecture, you study ancient architecture. And that's what this is. So also part of my career as an architect, I was a facility manager. And a lot of what we did is monitor, do facility inspections, condition assessments. Well, I used to do that on modern buildings. Now I do that on 700 to 1,000-year-old facilities. I'm the facility manager's way I look at it. And this is my real estate portfolio that I manage for the state and working with the conservancy. And I also do this work in Utah. So there's a lot of work to do if you're interested in this type of activity in a lot of very interesting areas. And it's really a privilege to be able to do this and be allowed to know this site and know how to, you know, what happened here and what the people were about and how they operated and how they lived, how they just lived and the culture, the location is really fascinating. And you learn all of that as you go. Architecture is my focus, but so much more to it than that. And it's a great opportunity.