Sudbury’s Big Nickel is part of the GeoTour
© Parks Canada

By Nicole Cooper & Svenja Hansen

Do you love adventure and the outdoors? Ever heard of geocaching? Parks Canada has just launched its Heritage Hide’n’Seek GeoTour. We’ll have you and your family searching for heritage treasures across Northern Ontario.

Best described as a high-tech treasure hunt, geocaching participants use GPS-enabled devices, such as smartphones, to navigate to a set of coordinates to locate a hidden container, known as a cache. Geocaching is practiced worldwide by over 5 million people, everyone from young families to retired couples. There are more than 2 million geocaches registered online.

Not your typical history lesson, the Heritage Hide’n’Seek GeoTour guides adventurers to locations throughout Northern Ontario to learn about fascinating people, places and events that helped shape our beautiful nation.

The Heritage Hide’n’Seek GeoTour is set up as a game where each cache is assigned a point value depending on the amount of effort required to find it. Locations range from urban, in downtown Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, to remote, requiring a train journey and boat trip to reach scenic Moose Factory Island. Anyone who collects 100+ points, as a result of finding several of the caches, is eligible to receive a collectible coin from Parks Canada.

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