Leave These Southwest Ruins Alone; New York Times, 12/22/13

David Roberts, New York Times; Leave These Southwest Ruins Alone: "By now, all that saves the still-pristine sites such as the one on the Navajo reservation is their obscurity and the difficulty of getting to them. With my fellow aficionados of the canyon country, I adhere to a rigid ethic: When you visit the ruins and rock art, disturb nothing, and if you write about them, be deliberately vague about where they are... The most ominous new trend is the proliferation of websites giving the GPS coordinates of those prehistoric ruins and rock art panels. Armed with those numbers, the most casual curiosity seeker need not even read a map: One can simply home in on the place with device in hand. And it is those folks, I believe, like the climber on Flickr with the self-portrait of his illegal climb into the forbidden ruin, who are most likely to take home potsherds or arrowheads as souvenirs, or to damage the stone-and-adobe rooms as they clamber through them. Can anything be done to reverse this trend?... Educating the public may be the only hope."