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The full Geocaching.com GeoTour, like Gold Country has, is quite pricey. I think it starts at around $2500.00 to have a geocaching.com branded GeoTour and then you've got the cost of all the paraphernalia like coins, brochures, staff, etc.

 

We've been asked us why there isn't a 'GeoTour' in the Cowichan Valley after all the work setting up the Island Spirit 2012 legacy trail of caches. There are 192 geocaches and they all get visited regularly. In a way, it's serving it's purpose to bring people to the region, long after the rush of the Island Spirit event and week of events/activities. Does it need to be come a GeoTour? Last year there were coins to earn/find and lots of cool Island Spirit swag sponsored/funded by Tourism Cowichan, the Cowichan Valley Regional District, the BCGA, WorldCaching and Landsharkz.ca. It was a great team effort and as a result the region was busy with local and visiting cachers well into the fall and even through the winter. It's creating exactly what we told the sponsor it should do!

 

To make it into a GeoTour on geocaching.com and Tourism Cowichan's own site, would require a bit of time and money by the Cowichan Valley Tourism Region and a lot of participation by local government. They'd need to create the additional webspace, work with geocaching.com to promote it on their website and then create the marketing material for their tourism publications. Their tourist guide goes to print well before the next season. They'd need to come up with a new coin and probably new caches to entice people back. When you look at the area, and consider BC Parks and the CVRD's geocaching policies/requests there really isn't room for another great influx of caches.

 

In both instances we know about (Best of the Bad and Gold Country), the toursim regions paid for the programs with funding from local industry/government or they accessed grants through their provincial government (Western Economic Dev).

 

BC Parks has done two promotions using geocaching and offering coins but there's nothing coming up that I'm aware of.

 

Also, the Western Economic Development office that partially financed the two GeoTours noted, have said they likely won't offer funding for these in the future.

 

This summer Gold Country is offering a third Geo Tourism program. The launch event is on June 29th if you want to take part in the action!

Gold Country Geocaching Poker Run

 

You can find details here: Gold Country GeoTour on Geocaching.com

or here: http://www.goldtrail.com/news.cfm

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