If you like treasure hunts, you’ll like this: Richmond is now the first, official geocache city in Canada.
Geocaching is an interactive online game that gets people outside in order to find hidden objects and secret words placed across a vast geographic region.
The City of Richmond recently organized its own GeoTour to become the first Canadian city to do so.
The game takes people on a whirlwind adventure through Richmond.
“This is a wonderful opportunity for global visitors along with locals and families to discover Richmond while searching for treasures,” said Mayor Malcolm Brodie. “Searching will likely take participants to outdoor areas of Richmond many have never seen before,” added Brodie in a news release.
Geocache participants, known as geocachers, create an online account and use a smartphone app or GPS device to locate hidden containers called geocaches.
They contain secret words, which should be recorded in a passport that can either be downloaded and printed from the city’s website or picked up at the Richmond Nature Park.
Geocachers are encouraged to write their account username on a small piece of paper found inside the container.
City staff members have placed 30 hidden geocaches all around the city for people to find. Most of the locations are in parks, fields and trails.
If you collect all 30 secret words the city will hand you a special geocache coin as a prize.
Adding to the excitement, some geocaches have a small box containing small items like toys. Geocache players are encouraged to swap one of their small items for one in the box.
On the website geocaching.com, players can rate their favourite location and judge the difficulty, terrain and size of each.
So far, Richmond’s GeoTour has garnered 238 likes, which should increase exponentially as summer approaches.
The most popular geocache site is called “Flighty Things” and is found in the Richmond Nature Park.
It would be difficult to find all 30 geocaches in one day, so the point of the game is to work at one’s own pace and enjoy the sites.
Nine geocache opportunities will present themselves with a simple bike ride along the dyke from the No. 3 Road pier to Terra Nova, via Steveston.
A car may likely be necessary to complete the task, as some geocaches are located in obscure places such as the one dubbed “Pocket Forest” in east Richmond on Fedoruk Road.
If you need help, you can go to geocaching.com and look up Richmond’s GeoTour to read hints and comments from past players.
There are more than 6 million geocachers wiorldwide.
Richmond is the first Canadian city to put itself on the geocache map. The online game has people out in nature looking for hidden objects Photos by geocaching.com.
