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Clearwater student heads to Heritage Fair provincials

Reid Muddiman’s Thunder Bear Golden Skull project has earned him a spot at the provincial level
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By Jaime Polmateer

A Grade 5 Raft River Elementary student is taking his Heritage Fair project to Squamish next month where he’ll compete at the provincial level.

Reid Muddiman, who chose the Thunderbear Golden Skull treasure hunt as the topic for his presentation, recently passed the regional competition in Kamloops and said he looks forward to representing his school at provincials.

“It’s a real honour and I’m extremely happy,” Muddiman said. “It’s crazy, I never thought I would be able to do that.”

The Thunderbear Golden Skull treasure hunt started in 1993 and took until ‘99 before the winners of the hunt finally found the replica golden skull.

The real skull was made of solid gold with rubies for eyes and cost about $150,000 to make, but to avoid having treasure hunters use metal detectors to aid in finding the skull, creators of the hunt made a replica skull, which they hid 16 kms outside of Clearwater.

The whole hunt was thought up as a way to attract tourists to the area and it worked, with people coming from far away places like Germany, New Zealand and Australia to take part.

“My dad showed me a video about this golden skull treasure hunt and I was like, that’s really cool,” Muddiman said of what inspired him to use the topic for his project.

He added there was a revival of the hunt he took part in with his family when he was younger and the Muddiman’s actually won $1,000, but in the end his mother gave the money back.

“My mom couldn’t accept it because she felt guilty,” he said.

“We hadn’t hiked all the trails and to win you had to hike these trails and identify these different plants, but she just used her knowledge of plants to figure out the rest of the questions, so she didn’t take (the money).”

For his project on the original hunt Muddiman inteviewed Mike Ritcey, one of the people who came up with the treasure hunt idea, as well as Sandy and Wayne Sunderman, who are the two who eventually found the Thunderbear Golden Skull, to get first-hand information.

It took him almost a month to complete and now due to his hard work, he’ll be heading to Squamish in early July to go up against kids from across B.C.

“I’m quite amazed and at a loss for words,” he said.

“It’s a really big honour to do this and represent my school.”



newsroom@clearwatertimes.com

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