Mark Neuberger (Deepdish23) has requested NoVAGO reach out to area cachers to find volunteers to adopt caches in the Geotours. The following is a letter from him providing some background.

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The National Park Service in the Mid-Atlantic Region played an important part in the creating of the Geotour.  The first two Geotours that existed were the Star-Spangled Banner Geotour in 2011 and the Captain John Smith Geotour in 2012.  In 2018, the NPS along with the Chesapeake Conservancy helped in establishing the Find Your Chesapeake Geotour.  These Geotours brought geocaching to places that never allowed geocaching previously and brought geocachers from around the world to the Mid-Atlantic region.

With the retirement of Cindy Chance at the National Park Service a few years ago, there has not been a replacement at the NPS that is watching over the three Geotours.  Myself and Chris (Awesnap) along with some geocaching volunteers have been trying our best to keep the Geotours going, but it had become an increasing difficult task and many geocaches on the Geotours have begun to become archived as the caches go missing.

After having a discussion with Groundspeak, and with their desire to try and keep these three Geotours running due to their impact and importance, we are going to start adopting out the remaining active caches on the three Geotours to geocachers who are able to maintain them.  They will become one of your owned geocaches, but will still be part of the Geotours.  Chris and I have gotten a few containers that were given to us by the NPS a few years ago, as replacements, but once those are gone, you will have to use your containers to maintain them.  If you would like to adopt one or some of the geocaches from the list of geocaches please let myself (deepdish23) and/or Chris (Awesnap) know through the geocaching.com Messaging mechanism and I will send you an adoption request.  Once you adopt it, the geocache will be yours.  I would ask if you are unable to keep maintaining the geocache to let us know so we can try and find someone else. 

In terms of maintaining the geocaches, I ask that you are able to do it in a timely manner.  These are Geotour caches.  From someone who has worked on several Geotours, because many geocachers work on Geotours to get the souvenir, and you only can get the souvenir when finding every cache on the tour, some geocachers do not like it if they leave an area without finishing a Geotour because of missing caches, and many will publicly post something.

At this point, any geocaches on the three tours that do not get adopted out will remain active until they go missing, and if we are unable to find a volunteer to replace the cache, it will be archived.

I want to thank the many volunteers along the way that have helped in the Star-Spangled Banner, Captain John Smith, and Find Your Chesapeake Geotours.  In addition, I would also like to thank Sue Kelley (calvertcachers) who organized the SSB and CJS Tours along with Cindy Chance at the National Park Service.  And also, thanks to Chris Gaida (AweSnap) who has helped me in the last couple of years to try and keep these GeoTours going.

One final note, there are still a few Find Your Chesapeake Geocoins remaining and you may send your passport to the address listed on the passport to receive your Geocoin.

Mark Neuberger

Deepdish23

List of parks and caches available to adopt: Status-Of-Geotour-Caches.xlsx-08_27_2626.pdf