A quest for fun

The perfect outdoor day gives you a little fun exercise, takes you to a beautiful place, and teaches you something. By that definition, I had a perfect outdoor day recently while cross-country skiing at Mountain Top Inn  in Chittenden, Vermont.

I got be be a guinea pig for their brand new “Nordic Quest.” These events have sprung up all over Vermont recently. They're well worth checking out, especially if you have kids -- or if you like your adventures in small doses and with rewards.

What’s a Nordic Quest? It’s a treasure hunt, a way to get some exercise on a winter day, and an opportunity to learn about the place you are visiting.

Basically, you strap on cross-country skis (or snowshoes if you don’t happen to ski), and follow the directions written in couplets that kinda-sorta qualify as poetry. These couplets contain clues which help you collect pieces of a puzzle. Solving the puzzle brings you to a treasure box which has a guest book to sign and a stamp to put in your own “Quest Book.”

It’s a lot like orienteering, but without a map or compass -- or like geocaching without a global positioning device. Which is to say you don’t need a lot of skill.

We did our quest on skis. My companions for the journey were Steve Glazer, who has, literally, written the books on Questing in the upper Connecticut River Valley, and Peter Oliver. Oliver is a fellow journalist and veritable jackrabbit of a skier. I struggled along on my skate skis that are still-learning how to cooperate with me.

With Peter questing far ahead, it took about 45 minutes on a cold and breezy afternoon to follow a winding trail through the woods through mixed forests of beech and maple. On the way we visited a gravesite with a spectacular view and skied past some beautiful “cottages” that I wouldn’t mind having for a primary home.

On the way, we collected our clues. Later, over hot chocolate, we solved the particular puzzle of this quest. A couple of kids had done the quest just before us, and they were still excited by the adventure. The only prize to start is a stamp in your book. But you can complete a number of quests and earn patches. Dedicated "Questers" carve their own stamps to leave a record of their success in the logbook for each Quest.

There’s no competition in Questing and you can do it at your own pace. Most places that participate have more than one Quest, so you can do several in a day. And not all are done on skis. Many more are activities for a summer evening.

>> Find out more about winter Questing around the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire.

>> For the Quests you can do on skis,  plus a log book of your own. 

These sites make it seem like Questing is for kids. Don’t believe it! It’s an excuse for anyone to get outdoors, and have fun.