Hello, Apogee Family –

For more than 15 years, it has been my great privilege to co-direct Apogee alongside Kevin Cashman, my partner and Apogee’s founder. Through thick and thin, we have enjoyed a fantastic journey growing Apogee from a small summer program to the robust enterprise that it is today.

As many of you know, I joined Kevin in 2009. By 2019, with 10 years of co-directing behind us and a great team onboard, I started to think about branching out in new directions. My wife, Susan, and I had dreamed of running hiking trips for small groups of adults for many years and we were excited to get the ball rolling as I continued to work at Apogee. To that end, in mid-2019, we filed the paperwork to establish Parallel Adventures – our European hiking program for adults – with a goal of running our first programs in the spring of 2020. It goes without saying that things did not turn out as planned in 2020, and we spent that year and much of the next doing our best to keep Apogee afloat during the pandemic. As we recovered from the many challenges presented by Covid and its implications on employment, travel, education, mental health, and any number of other matters, the Parallel goal was paused until 2022, when we ran our first trip to Spain – two years later than planned.

Since then, we have nurtured the Parallel seed and watched it grow into the sprout that it is today, with 10 different trips across three different itineraries behind us. As Parallel matures, I am excited to put more energy behind the project. To that end, I will be largely stepping back from day-to-day operations at Apogee and turning over many of my responsibilities to Will Robertson, Apogee’s newest Director. Will first led trips with us in 2014 and has been working with us year round since 2017. Anyone who meets Will, as many of you have, is immediately impressed with his caring for Apogee’s mission, his deep knowledge base, and his drive. Will’s combination of youthful energy, experience, and compassion make him, in my humble opinion, the perfect person to work alongside Kevin and guide Apogee in the coming years. I will still be involved with Apogee as an Advisory Director for the foreseeable future, but will be working in a more behind-the-scenes capacity.

In the meantime, please know that my time here at Apogee has been, and remains, the highlight of a varied, fulfilling career. It has been enormously rewarding to contribute to a small business that is dedicated to young people and their growth. I hope to do so for years to come, if in a different capacity in the days ahead. I will be looking forward to seeing many of you and your children here at Apogee in the coming summers, and, I hope, some of you on the trails of Europe on a Parallel trip. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Will to the Apogee helm!

Best,
Chad Olcott