Hide-and-go-seek is but a childhood memory for many Calgarians, but the city’s Parks department is taking the game to a whole new level.
For its 100th anniversary, City of Calgary Parks will be orchestrating the first citywide game in Canada through geocaching, a hobby that uses GPS to find small “caches” hidden in an area.
The Parks department is hiding 25 of these parcels per month throughout the summer and filling them with little prizes.
The big prize will be for the first person to find each of the caches. They will be entered into a draw to win one of three GPS systems.
For those Calgarians who don’t already have a GPS, they will be able to pick one up as of May 13 from their local Calgary Public Library (with their library card) or the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary. Others can go to the City of Calgary website and load the co-ordinates of the caches on their GPS.
“We thought, ‘What would would be a unique idea to promote Calgary’s parks?’” said Todd Reichardt, a Parks department spokesperson.
The idea of the project is to get Calgarians active and exploring the city’s green space, to learn about Calgary’s history through info stored in the caches, and, most of all, to have fun, Reichardt said.
The project is costing the city $5,000.
