It is with extreme disappointment that the organizing team for NiteHike has made the decision to suspend this year's event. There has been much uncertainty in the world over the last couple of weeks with regards to COVID-19. The NiteHike team feels that the actual threat of infection is extremely low and can be worked around by increasing our work around food safety and hand washing protocols at stations. Unfortunately, as of March 12, we are unable to predict whether BC's conditions will improve, stay the same, or worsen.
The NiteHike team has worked to ensure that there are adequate reserves to recover from one year of poor attendance, but our planning has been around weather or storm related events, not factors of public health which could change on short notice. Should we continue to plan for NiteHike 2020, and be forced to cancel past March 12th, it would be extremely difficult to recover from the costs we have to incur before anyone even shows up to register.
We are absolutely committed to returning stronger than ever in 2021, as our event date has already been set as Apr 10th-11th, 2021. We will be using our planning time that would be going into 2020 to enact some technology and operation changes that we have been trying to make for the last couple of years, and just haven't been able to work on.
Further questions can be directed to nitehike@scouts.ca