The United Nations Organization has named our park an educational, scientific and cultural gem.

These draft examples of QR signs demonstrate an inexpensive, editable, on-the-spot and hands-on way of providing visitors who walk or bike along its tracks with a hundred reasons why it is such a gem, when these small unobtrusive signs are placed along the tracks and scanned with cellphones. Try scanning one now.

Large coloured information signs are expensive, obtrusive and static, and very limited in the information they give, whiles very few casual visitors carry books with facts about the park's plants, animals, rocks, history, weather, Maori culture et al.

Experts in many different fields could provide interesting material about trees, bushes, ferns, orchids, mosses, epiphytes, communities, zonation, evolution, birds, insects, bats, pests, how plants avoided being eaten, geography, use of different geographic features by both Maori and Europeans, geology, vulcanology, climate change, logging and railway stories, Maori foods, medicines, stories,myths, LOTR filming locations. Can you suggest any more?

Retired schoolteachers like yours truly could introduce topics by breaking them down to digestible lumps; then the students in the computer clubs at Ruapehu College and Turangi School could make the webpages. Different colours on the QR signs could indicate each field of interest.

The signs could be printed on plastic A6 size (7x10cm, $5) and mounted almost horizontally close to the ground on short stakes ($2.50) These would be cheap to make, light to carry and quick'n'easy to install.

QR Orienteering Competitions

The QR codes could be also used as target location recorders for competitive orienteering with maps on cellphone apps to guide competitors to each target location.

Each competitor would scan the QR code and take a selfie of her/himself beside the QR sign, and text it to the competition organiser, thus recording where and when she/he was there.

Money, Money, Money

And of course, like Baldrick putting forth one of cunning plans, I'm proposing this $cheme as a cunning plan to get vi$itors $pending more time on each of their walk$, and finding them more intere$ting, so that they $tay longer, come back more often, and $pend more money on meal$, bike$ and bed$ to compensate for the average 12% less snow we are getting each winter.