Managed Access to Conservancy Caves and Land

Emily Davis, Access Coordinator, Northeast Cave Conservancy

It is a commonly understood fact that when an organization takes on the responsibility of managing land, or in most of our cases, land with caves, we really take on the responsibility of managing people. Most conservancies that create preserves wish to keep the land as open and available to the public as possible. This philosophy extends even to the caves we view as sensitive or especially prized.
 
Managing people at times boils down to managers attempting to instill necessary conditions on access, whether for reasons of conservation, safety or even in some cases esthetics. The latter being the case when two sizable groups may be asked not to conflict so that each may gain the most positive experience and maximum benefit for their respective visitation.
 
With reasonable effort on the part of all parties these conditions are welcome as the best of all worlds. The cave property is not over or badly used. The experiences on the properties are educational, safe and conservation minded.
 
The negative side comes when visitors see every rule as a restriction and every interaction with the managers as a barrier to access. To avoid the negative side of the equation we attempt to make every condition we place on access to our lands serve a purpose that benefits the special needs of the preserve in question. We then attempt to have uniformly applied and uniformly perceived explanations and descriptions of our conditions for access.
 
For many the face of our organization is the access managers and the forms or conditions they use to facilitate access onto our lands.
 
In my session at the 2004 National Cave Conservancies Forum, we will compare philosophies of managed access and as importantly, the forms, signatures sheets and other physical devices we use when we administer access to our lands.
 
I plan to discuss such diverse problems as foreign speaking visitors, (French speakers are common in the Northeast and thus the NSS and NCC properties of the NE have French language information available.) youth groups and those who visit soon after a change in property ownership and "don't need to do that because we have been going here for years".