In May of 2010 the first Geotrail in West Virginia was unveiled at an event in Beckley. The Coal Heritage Geotrail - put together by Coal Heritage Highway Authority. This geotrail is a lot more spread out and challenging than the Black Walnut Geotrail, but provides a different feel and look to a concept. The concept, for those unfamiliar, is to unify a series of caches to challenge the participant to complete all of them in order to show them something about an area. It really isn't all that different than a challenge cache such as the County Challenge, Parks Challenge or DeLorme Challenge. The main difference is that they are normally funded by an entity unrelated to geocaching due to a nature of wishing folks to participate in something often unrelated to geocaching.

In developing the ideas for this trail I first consulted with the York County Geocaching Organization (YOGO) in South Carolina. As you may or may not know the city of Rock Hill and surrounding area is a mecca for geocaching along the southern end of the I-77 corridor. YOGO and York County have developed a great relationship. The geotrails in their program have been very successful. I learned that an important part of furthering this success is being able to quantify the success outside of sheer participation. One of the ways they have been able to do this is through the concept of the "passport" or "brochure" that participants must turn in to officially complete the trail. In addition to stamping the brochure, a few simple questions are asked. By keeping this data we can determine the return on investment and decide on future prizes as well as being able to provide a model of our success to other organizations seeking to provide unique tourism opportunities (read: more geotrails for us to tackle).

You may or may not know about the ExploreWV challenges that are forthcoming. I had the good fortune of learning about these early on, but they have been publicly looking for volunteers around West Virginia via the Groundspeak Forums as well as through the MAGPI Forum (Mountaineer Area Geocaching Persons of Interest). These new geotrails promise to take it to a whole new level and attract visitors from all across America to visit West Virginia. I'm very excited to be one of many volunteers to help make these challenges happen and hopefully successful. Geocaching has grown leaps and bounds in the 10 years since its inception. What the next 10 years has in store I don't know, but I do believe that organized embracing of geotourism by state and local officials will be a big part of that.