When December 10, 2024 at 1:00pm 1 hr
Where Virtual

Building Relationships with the Gila Centennial Story Map

Presenter: Lynne Westerfield, MA, Wild Arizona Stewardship Program Director

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This year, Wild Arizona created their second Story Map using this much lauded visual story telling tool to highlight the Gila Wilderness Centennial and the newly minted and quite burly 100 mile Centennial Trail. But they didn’t want to share the same wilderness story that has been shared for the past 100 years, and in the search for a forward looking perspective that brought wilderness into indigenous view, found they didn’t know what they were talking about! This is the story of how the descendants of the Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache peoples living in Fort Sill, Oklahoma helped teach the Wild Arizona crew what’s up in the Gila. Their Wild Stew Field Crew helped fill in the rest. We will follow the Gila Centennial Trail through Hummingbird Saddle, to ArcGIS, and out onto the world wide web. Beyond telling this story, Wild Arizona crews spent weeks brushing, treading, and sawing logs off of the trail in preparation for its unveiling as part of the Gila Centennial Celebration. 

 

Lynne Westerfield, M.A. is the Stewardship Program Director at Wild Arizona where Wild Stew Field Crews accomplish hundreds of miles of remote and rugged trail maintenance annually and by hand. She also develops and directs many of Wild Arizona’s watershed and habitat restoration projects, including multi-year comprehensive biological monitoring, assessment and protection. Lynne is a Grand Canyon River Guide. Prior to working for Wild Arizona she founded the Cloud City Consideration Center in Leadville, Colorado.

 

 

Wild Arizona’s mission is to to protect, unite, and restore wild lands and waters across Arizona and beyond, for the enrichment and health of all citizens, and to ensure Arizona’s native plants and animals a lasting home in wild nature. The Stewardship program now has two professional year-round field crews, complimented by hundreds of volunteers that assist in stewardship projects across the state of Arizona and along the Mogollon Rim into New Mexico. Wild Arizona has a well established history of working towards successful administrative protections for Wilderness, Wild and Scenic Rivers and National Monuments.