Zelfgeleide speurtocht: Glenwood Springs Hospitality Hunt

This hunt involves finding various historic locations within a mile or so radius of downtown Glenwood Springs, and answering trivia questions or completing photo challenges at each site. (Let's Roam will try to tell you to pay $20 for each person participating, but you definitely don't need to do that. One phone per team will do just fine.) The answers to the questions are all things clearly visible or written on the location. Distances were easily walkable. My group had assumed there would be navigation to lead us to the next stop, but there isn't -- you are just given a general vicinity and a picture of the building you're trying to find. However, walking around looking for the location ended up being our favorite part! It made it feel more like a hunt, especially since the "challenges" are quite easy. One of the buildings looked slightly different than the provided picture, and the description of the location of one of the plaques wasn't accurate, but we mostly didn't have trouble finding things. However, the app itself is just... not great in some ways? It's not always intuitively designed and is glitchy at times. Here are the issues we noticed. 1: The app wouldn't allow us to "check in" at each location, even when we were standing on the sidewalk in front of the building and literally couldn't have gotten any closer. It kept saying we hadn't arrived, and we had to pick the "Check in anyway" option for fewer points. This was fine for us as a group of three pals doing some casual exploring, but if you were doing this hunt competitively with multiple teams, it could get pretty annoying to be constantly taking an undeserved points penalty. 2: The description/fun facts section for the Hotel Colorado listing is cut off mid-sentence, with no Read More or Expand option. I guess we'll never know what Al Capone used his secret passage for! 3: Some challenges require you to type in a multi-word answer into the supplied letter blanks. However, the text wrapping puts line breaks in the middle of words at times, making it appear that there are more words in an answer than there actually are. A little confusing, until we figured out it was just a quirk of the formatting. Overall, we had a nice time using this hunt for a kind of guided wander around downtown Glenwood, but the app has some issues that would be especially annoying for competitive play.

This hunt involves finding various historic locations within a mile or so radius of downtown Glenwood Springs, and answering trivia questions or completing photo challenges at each site. The answers to the questions are all things clearly visible or written on the location. Distances were easily walkable. My group had assumed there would be navigation to lead us to the next stop, but there isn’t— you just get a general vicinity and then a pic of the building you’re trying to find. However, walking around looking for the location ended up being our favorite part! It made it feel more like a hunt, especially since the “challenges” are quite easy. One of the buildings looked slightly different than the provided pic, and the description of the location of one of the plaques wasn’t accurate, but we mostly didn’t have trouble finding things. Note: The app will try to persuade you to pay $20 for each person participating, but you definitely don’t need to do that. One phone per team will do just fine. The app itself is… not great in some ways. It’s not always intuitively designed and is glitchy at times. Here are the issues we noticed. 1: The app wouldn’t allow us to “check in” at each location even when we were standing on the sidewalk directly in front of the building and literally couldn’t have gotten any closer. It kept saying we hadn’t arrived, and we had to pick the “check in anyway” option for fewer points. This was fine since we were just a group of three pals doing some casual exploring, but if you were doing this competitively with lots of teams, it could get pretty annoying to be constantly taking an undeserved penalty. 2: The description/fun facts for the Hotel Colorado listing is cut off mid sentence, with no Read More or drop down option, so I guess we’ll never know what Al Capone used his secret passage for. 3: Some challenges ask you to type in a multi-word answer into the blanks, but the text wrapping puts the line breaks in the middle of words at times, making it appear that there are more words in the answer than there really are. Overall, we had a nice time using this hunt as kind of a guided wander around downtown Glenwood, but the app definitely has some issues that would be annoying especially in competitive play.

While the scavenger hunt was fun and provided a learning experience relative to the history of Glenwood, it was not worth $20 per person. The two of us spent $40 for something that should have been covered with one fee. There was no distinction for two once you began the event and this should have been made more clear on the front end.