‘oTENTiks’ coming to PA National Park

“You get to come to the park, you get to have all the experiences like toasting marshmallows over the open fire and then you get to go inside your oTENTik in the evening. If you have young kids it’s really good, if the weather’s inclement they’re awesome,” said Bond.

Construction has begun on the year-round units and they are expected to be ready for visitors by mid July. Bond said they will cost about $100 per night.

June is going to be a busy month for the park as another initiative is scheduled to start next week.

PA National Park goes virtual

The park will be added to Google Maps Street View, a website that allows users to explore areas around the world through a 360 degree, first-person perspective.

Sometime in the next several weeks, Google will be at the park to collect the images needed to construct the virtual panorama. To capture these images, they use a ‘Trekker.’

“The Trekker is essentially a backpack that weighs around 40 pounds and has 15 cameras mounted on top and as the person who’s wearing the backpack walks through these paths it collects 360 degree, panoramic images every few feet,” said Google Maps spokesperson Aaron Brindle.

Those images are then processed and any identifying details like faces and license plates are blurred, creating what will be seen on Google Street View.

Because the park covers such a vast area, Parks Canada staff will make suggestions about what areas the trekker should photograph, said Bond. Some of these included the Beaver Glen and Red Deer campgrounds, one of the popular hiking trails and some of the park’s more remote beaches.

“We’re hoping that they kind of give us the greatest hits, if you will … and we’ve had a great deal of success working with Parks Canada,” said Brindle.

Parks Canada is hopeful that more people may choose to visit the park if they are able to virtually tour it first, “We recognize that a lot of people do their trip planning, for holidays, online and Google Street View technology offers people an opportunity to kind of view the park in a three dimensional level, as if they were really here,” said Bond.

Google will be adding more National Parks and historic sites to its Street View technology over the next year, said Brindle. “Starting this spring and continuing on into the fall of 2014, we’re going to visit 120 parks and historical sites across Canada.”

Some of the sites in Saskatchewan that will be added include Fort Walsh National Historic Site, Batoche National Historic Site, Fort Battleford National Historic Site and Grasslands National Park.

sleslie@panow.com

On Twitter: @_seanleslie

by Sean Leslie

‘oTENTiks’ coming to PA National Park

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