A local group of Chapel Hill and Carrboro residents have found a way to practice their treasure hunting skills with a unique activity: painting rocks.
Similar to geocaching, these local residents paint small rocks with various designs and place them around the Chapel Hill-Carrboro area.
“It’s like the ultimate treasure hunt, said Meg McGurk, executive director for Downtown Chapel Hill Partnerships. "You find it, you can keep it, you can make your own and leave them for someone else."
McGurk is involved with the rock painting scene in Chapel Hill. She paints her own rocks and scatters them throughout the area.
The Twitter account for Downtown Chapel Hill occasionally posts photos of painted rocks that have been found around Chapel Hill.
Karin Abell, the director for the English as a Second Language department at Durham Technical Community College, founded 2751* Rocks. The Facebook group connects close to 100 people who paint, hide and find rocks in the local area.
“At first I was just going to support existing groups—the Durham group, the Hillsborough group,” Abell said. "Then the more I talked to people, the more I thought about it, the more I was like, ‘You know, Chapel Hill and Carrboro really need their own group.’”
So far the group has been popular with all ages. Various pictures and posts of parents and kids finding and making painted rocks abound across the public page.
“A lot of the people when they hide the rocks will post a picture and they’ll say, ‘These have gone out,’ or you’ll see people posting pictures of rocks that they have found. I see a lot of that,” Mirrani Houpe, who paints and hides rocks with her wife, said.
