Inner City Search Party - Ballard
Submitted by seeverist on Sun, 2007-06-17 17:43.
Team finder
I was just wondering if anyone was planning on participating in this event on Saturday afternoon. It sounds like a bit of Street Scramble, City Chase (Canada Website Link ), Urban Dare, and Amazing Race - but with pubs too!
My wife and I just signed up as a two-person team. It's not necessarily cheap, but the money does go towards a good cause. More information at:
Inner City Search Party
Seattle Inner City Search Party
In the latest Street Scramble News, I saw this event mentioned as similar to Street Scrambles. My wife and I did this last year. Although similar, it leans more towards clue solving than athleticism. We came ready in our usual Scrambling attire to find out that we spent more time walking around looking for clues than actually jogging from place to place.
However the way it was set up in Ballard, there were three areas where most of the points were confined - downtown Ballard (close), the park around the Ballard Locks (medium), and in the Shilshole/Golden Gardens area (far). The point values were higher the further away that you were.
The maps were given right at the starting time, so there wasn't any prep time to design a route. That was built into the time we had to answer as many clues as we could. They also had some other 'activities' to be completed which included building card houses, a box of locks and keys and trying to match as many up as you could in limited time, and reading flag signals from across the locks (we didn't make it to Golden Gardens area).
After the event, I emailed them some suggestions - pretty much based on the Street Scrambles, and sent them to the Street Scramble website. Being the first year, the learning curve was likely pretty high, so I'm sure a lot of things will be tightened up.
So for those considering this event, it may be helpful to know that it's more about solving clues than running fast. And the more heads to solve clues - likely the better!
It looks like the Seattle area is going to have a lot of adventure races from all over the country running through this year. These include: The Oyster, Urban Dare, Great Urban Race, and the US version of the Mitsubishi City Chase.
It should be a busy summer!
~Steve