Last saturday we attended the Park Quest Finale at Tuckahoe State Park. This was the final competition for the families who completed at least 8 challenges at the 14 participating state parks across Maryland. It was a hot day but the Park Service, Rangers, and volunteers did a great job of keeping everybody well fed and hydrated. There were plenty of free drinks and Park Quest logo water bottles to fill up at the various water stations throughout the park.
We spent the night in Denton at our sister/aunt Kerry's house which was only about 15 minutes from the park. We arrived at the parking area about 10:30, loaded up the stroller with all our gear and hopped on the "hay-less" hay ride to the event area. There were 7 challenge stations mixed in among the food area, water stations, and display areas. One of the displays was "Scales and Tails", which is live animals including snakes, turtles, owls and other cool critters. The little kids really liked this display. Each team was to compete in each of the 7 challenges in which points were earned. At the end of the day, the 6 teams with the most points won 1 of 6 prize packages which were really nice. The Camping, Biking, and Kayaking packages included really nice gear for each activity for a family of four. The other 3 packages were vacation packages for Deep Creek Lake.
We didn't place in the top 6 so we didn't win any of the packages but we had a good time anyway. We are not sure of our final score or some of the scores for the events, as we didn't see them posted before they announced the winners. They also gave out randomly drawn door prizes throughout the day but we came up empty there too. The 7 challenges were Fishing, Disc Golf, Ranger Round Up, Orienteering, Putting out a "Fire", Park Photo Quest and Wildlife Photo Quest.
Each challenge had to be attempted by at least one adult and one kid. Ryan and R. did the fishing one, which was casting a weighted, hookless line at some circular targets. It was hard and we only scored 4 points but that was an improvement on our performance last year at the same event. Amy and R. participated in the Disc Golf challenge in which they had to play 3 holes of disc golf on the course within the park. They had to alternate throws and did well scoring a 5 on each of the three holes for a total score of 15. We are not sure how they awarded points for this one but we figured the three teams with the lowest scores earned a certain number of points. For the Ranger Round Up we had to find 5 Park Rangers (wasn't too hard) and ask them for a playing card. You turned in your cards at the end and the best poker hands earned points. Our hand was a High Card Ace which got us one point. Ryan and J. did the Orienteering challenge in which we were given a compass and directions to travel a certain distance/direction, then travel another certain distance/direction, then do it again and then estimate your finishing position. We were just a bit off and scored 6 out of 10 possible points. It would have been much easier if we were allowed to use our GPS receiver. The "Fire" Challenge was fun. They had these water-bag portable pumps that the park fire service uses to put out wildfires, kinda like this:
The bags were filled with water and the hand operated pump was used to knock down wooden targets painted like flames. Ryan and R. competed and knocked down the 8 targets in 10 seconds. This is another one in which we didn't know how they scored it but figured the fastest times earned a certain number of points. The Park Photo Quest we were all able to participate in but only 3 people at a time. We had 10 minutes to identify about 35 photographs of locations within the 14 parks. We thought we would have an advantage since we visited all 14 parks but some of the photos were tough to identify. I think we scored 53 out of 84 possible points. The last challenge was the wildlife photo quest. There were 25 pictures of plants and animals and a list of 50 possible names to identify them. We got 23 correct but fell for the trick questions and called a:
"Pileated Woodpecker"
a "red headed woodpecker"
and called a:
"pickerel frog"
a "leopard frog"
DUH! How could we have gotten those wrong?!?
Anyway, we had a fun time and the Park Service and Rangers really put on a great event. We received a certificate for completing it as well as cool water bottles and t-shirts for everybody to remind us of our fun summer participating in Park Quest 2009.
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