Every so often I get a question about how to go about adopting caches of inactive geocachers. There is a form for this on the Geocaching.com website but it only works if you can get the cooperation of the inactive geocacher, which is not always easy to do, especially if they are no longer monitoring their emails sent via Geocaching.com. But if you do manage to get their cooperation and permission, have them use the page I linked to above.
If you can’t get their permission, I’m afraid their caches can’t be adopted. In those cases, you could post a “Needs Archived” log on them,
which flags them to our attention as well as to the attention of the cache owner. We will give the cache owner a reasonable amount of time to respond. If the cache owner does not respond, the
cache will be archived and another geocacher is then able to submit a new
geocache at that location. Heck, you can even give the new cache the same name if you want to. More often, new caches at the same location as an archived cache are usually designated with a name that lets geocachers know there's "fresh meat" out there for the finding. For example, "Under the Bridge - Redux" or "Under the Bridge Take 2" or something similar.
