River Recreation Working Group
Purpose
Citizens, organizations, agencies, and local government collaborate to ensure stewardship for well-managed recreational and educational opportunities that sustainably connect people to nature along the river and upland ecosystems.
Coordination
Conveners: TBD
Facilitation: Southwest Decision Resources
Meetings
As needed
Current Participants
Town of Camp Verde
Town of Clarkdale
City of Cottonwood
Yavapai County
Yavapai-Apache Nation
US Forest Service – Coconino National Forest
US Forest Service – Prescott National Forest
Arizona Game and Fish
Arizona State Parks and Trails
Friends of the Verde River
Goals
Ensure that outdoor oriented opportunities are sustainable and do not damage important natural resources in the Verde River and uplands.
Increase collaborative management of visitation and recreation site capacity.
Monitor the effects and benefits of recreation for users, the environment, and the economy.
Employ the Visitor Use Management Framework to inventory current conditions, develop desired condition statements, and set triggers and management actions in response to triggers.
Integrate monitoring with the Verde Watershed Report Card effort.
Improve user safety and support effective law enforcement and first responders.
Coordinate law enforcement and first responders to address needs and opportunities.
Develop map tools and support improved communication infrastructure to improve emergency response.
Support efforts to address recreational shooting.
Engage guides, user groups in promoting preparedness.
Moving Forward
Monitoring and Visitor Use Management
Short Term:
Evaluate and refine the inventory of current conditions at recreational reaches and individual recreation sites (“pearls").
Continue to develop desired conditions for recreational reaches and/or individual recreation sites/pearls.
Initiate visitor use monitoring that includes social surveys, rapid recreation site surveys, visitor use data collection (particularly on number of visitors, length of stay, length of travel, reason for visit) and correlated to support future trends tabulations.
Use survey data to inform the Verde Front in identifying important indicators and thresholds to inform recreation management activities.
Long Term:
Continue the Verde Front’s collective work in moving through the visitor use management framework process, including:
The identification of “triggers” based on the indicators and thresholds identified for monitoring recreation use;
Development of management actions in response to triggers;
Determine appropriate capacity to achieve desired conditions on the ground;
Incorporate monitoring for ongoing adaptive management.
Involve Verde Front partners and Leadership Council members in the collaborative effort to develop the indicators and thresholds for the Verde Watershed Report Card, bringing priorities for sustainable recreation management to the table in building the Report Card framework.
Use the results from the Verde Watershed Report Card to identify indicators and thresholds to continue informing visitor use management strategies for the Verde Front and its working groups.
Safety
Short Term:
Develop a comprehensive and robust map (for internal use) of river access points, significant landmarks or features, and extraction points for use by emergency response personnel, law enforcement offices, and other safety staff.
This can be used by dispatchers to direct search-and-rescue teams and LEOs to the correct recreational areas for incidents.
Explore the potential for boosting cell service or other signal to areas of the river corridor where service is currently blacked out or unreliable.
River managers should note that Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office has four portable repeaters that can enhance signal and range for police bandwidths for use in emergencies.
Convene an annual gathering of all regional law enforcement agencies, emergency response personnel, public safety officials, and public land management staff.
The purpose would be to conduct a coordinated, region-wide briefing about the past year’s recreational management and incident reports to identify trends, emerging problems or challenges, or simply to communicate about recreation management and safety.
Long Term:
Examine the possibility for obtaining information to provide advance warning of flood events and weather hazards along the Verde River corridor.
Work to ensure better coordination of public safety officials in making use of existing systems.
A longer-term goal would be to put a comprehensive system in place to monitor flows along the recreational stretches of the Verde River.
Work with local outfitters and other recreation-related businesses to encourage and promote advance planning by recreational users to ensure that people are prepared with the right safety equipment (PFDs, maps) to have a positive and safe experience.