Nature Treasure Hunts with Kids

There are lots of ways to make hiking more enticing to kids. I have one friend who ran ahead and hid little toys along the trail for her young daughter to find as she walked. There's always the alphabet game or rainbow game: find something that starts with every letter, or in every color, in order, as you walk along the trail. 

We have a really great program in our area (central Vermont and New Hampshire) called Valley Quests that has largely done this job for us. Valley Quests are simply walks or hikes in the area made into treasure hunts. There is a quest box at the end-- the top of the mountain or whatever the destination is-- containing a log book to sign your name and write a message if you desire, a tidbit of information about the site, and a handmade stamp with an ink pad so you can make a stamp and remember you were there.  (You could stamp on anything; we own one of the Quest books so we've taken to collecting all our stamps in the back of that.) Along the way there are clues to mark your journey: a huge burl on the side of a tree, an old stone wall, a distant view of a particular mountain from a certain spot.

I have absolutely loved them. There isn't any actual treasure to collect, besides the stamp and the satisfaction of finding the box, which is sometimes pretty tricky! But just having the clues to read and the thrill of being the first to spot this or that landmark is motivating and fun. 

Countless times when I have had time to "kill" with one kid while waiting to pick the other up from an activity, I've gone to the Valley Quest site, where you can search by town, and checked out what quests might be in the vicinity. I am continually impressed that we find special little spots we never knew about this way, even though my husband and I have lived in this area for twenty years.

Where's M?

I feel it is important to note that in general I do not love scavenger-hunt-type things; give a group of kids (or their chaperones!) a scavenger hunt to do on a museum field trip, for example, and you can guarantee they will race through the museum frantically checking things off while being blind to anything and everything not on The List. Scavenger hunts can falsely prescribe what's important and turn off any natural learning or interest. Stepping off my soap box now... Somehow Valley Quests feel different; they introduce us to new natural places, and they make us actually slow down on a walk and really look at all the details around us. Since these quests take place in nature, quite often things have changed a bit since the quest author wrote the clue and now the young sapling is a full-grown tree or the rotting log is fully covered in moss. A "birch with bark so white" took us a long time because it had lost all its bark since the clue had been written. But it's neat to look and look and look and only adds to the excitement when we figure those things out too. 

Finally found it!

Collecting the stamp

Found it!

They aren't all big hikes either-- lots of them are quite short indeed. We've even done a Civil-War-themed cemetery quest, as well as a quest to the tiniest park that we never would have noticed otherwise in downtown Lebanon, NH.

Civil-War-themed cemetery quest

Quest to a tiny downtown park

Our love of Quests inspired my kids and I to make one of our own this year. It was a process, but pretty straight-forward, because the Valley Quest site lays out the steps and materials needed very clearly. We had several fun outings, choosing to do our research on especially nice days, as we tried to settle on a location for our Quest. There was some debate about where it should be-- we didn't want it to be too intense or long of a hike so as not to scare some people away from doing it. We wanted it to be relatively convenient for us to check in on from time to time. We wanted it to be a special spot, with a defined destination, not just a random walk. We wanted it to be in the woods, not in a busy or residential area where it would get accidentally spotted or messed with. Eventually we came to agreement. 

And then we walked it some more. We all brought along clipboards or notebooks and jotted down ideas for fun landmarks and clues. Back at home, we synthesized them into an order. In a few separate sittings, we word-smithed a bit, deciding not to stress ourselves out with rhyming (many Quests we'd done, but not all, seemed to rhyme). We also decided to draw a rough, not-to-scale map to go with it-- my son took this on. We decided to make it a riddle Quest, with blanks to fill in as you go and then some letters to unscramble at the end because my daughter had really enjoyed a Quest of that type we'd done before. Finally, we did a little basic research about the Appalachian Trail and wrote up a paragraph about it to include in our box, because our Quest happens to be located along it. 

Hard at work

Finally, we were down to a really fun art project: carving a rubber stamp. Each Quest has its own unique stamp. We had some different ideas about what our stamp should be. In the end, we had such fun carving the stamps and liked them all so much that we decided to put all three in our finished box and let Questers themselves decide which they wanted to use.       

We submitted our Quest to Vital Communities, the organization that manages them, and they accepted it and posted it to their site. Find it here! 

In our finished plastic Quest box we placed: a small notebook to be a log book, a pencil, a manual pencil sharpener, our stamps, an ink pad, and our card of information about the area. 

It was fun to work on a joint project together, and doing so was a reminder that, with my kids almost five years apart and with different temperaments, it can be pretty challenging to work on a joint project together and meet everybody's needs and wishes! But we did it. Like any big, long-term project, there's a sense of satisfaction when all the pieces come together in the end. (And when we visited our box in the woods recently, after first placing it there about a month ago, it was a reward to find that three people had already visited and signed the log book.) 

We're pretty proud of our Quest and if you ever find yourself in the "Upper Valley" (the Connecticut River Valley area of central Vermont and New Hampshire) with a little extra time on your hands, you might want to check it out. Find our own full Quest here!  

Do you have any programs like Valley Quest in your area, or do you do anything like this to make walks more enticing for your kids?