People who visit at least six of the 10 parks -- which include Trexler Nature Preserve, Hugh Moore Park and the South Bethlehem Greenway -- will receive prizes.
Ten Lehigh Valley parks are banding together to encourage community wellness and increased visitation.
People who visit at least six of the 10 parks — which include Jacobsburg State Park, Trexler Nature Preserve, Hugh Moore Park and the South Bethlehem Greenway — will receive prizes. Those who visit all 10 parks will be entered in a drawing to win a park pavilion rental and a $100 gift certificate to Wegmans, the effort’s chief sponsor.
The idea came from officials at the Lehigh Gap Nature Center in Slatington and the Gertrude B. Fox Environmental Center at Illick’s Mill in Bethlehem who were seeking to increase visitation between local nature centers.
“The idea was to get people outdoors and back into nature,” said John Chay, the head of systems and operations at the Fox center. “We’re especially hoping families will do this because a lot of young people have lost that connection with the outdoors.”
Organizers think children will be especially attracted to the collecting part of the park visits, which involves rubbing the park’s name into a booklet from a stamp-of-sorts placed along trails. Chay likened it to a scavenger hunt.
The parks — who are part of the Lehigh Valley Nature Center Network — started making its own park visitation booklet until they learned Wegmans does a similar effort in other communities. Wegmans’ Passport to Family Wellness effort fits well with the supermarket’s eat well, live well initiative, said Jared Fedor, a perishable area manager at Wegmans’ Allentown store.
Wegmans has other Passports to Family Wellness efforts in New York and Virginia but this is the store’s first-such passport in Pennsylvania, Fedor said.
The stamp at Jacobsburg — where the effort was unveiled today — is along the park’s popular Henry’s Woods Trail off Belfast Road. The trail has undisturbed trees, some that date back 180 years, and travels along the Bushkill Creek, said Robert Neitz, the park’s environmental education center manager.
“It’s a great example of an old-growth forest that’s unique not just to the Lehigh Valley but Pennsylvania,” he said.
The Lehigh Valley Greenways Conservation Landscape Initiative — a group of 25 local environmental groups — just added wellness to its vision statement and strongly supports the project, member Sherry Acevedo said.
“This will help bring more families out for health living … and to promote all of the projects we have,” said Acevedo, the conservation coordinator for the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor.
Passports can be picked up at any of the participating nature centers and local Wegmans stores.