If you want self- guided ecotourists to stay longer in your community you need to educate them on your special features. What do you do if you don’t have the budget to hire real people to provide interpretation services or you find that your visitors’ schedules don’t match your planned activities? Writing on The Stone Provincial Park in western Canada (http://gateway.cd.gov.ab.ca/siteinformation.asp?id=177) has a great self-guided interpretative hike that could be adapted by almost any community. A dozen numbered signs are posted along the trail. At the trailhead there is a mailbox with a paper booklet offering interpretive information that corresponds to the sign numbers. Come around the corner and find some unusual brown matter in the rocks? Open the interpretative booklet and find out that you are looking at the middens of the nocturnal wood rats! It’s like having an interpreter in your backpack. Using this interpretative tool turned a 30 minute walk for me into a 2 hour voyage of discovery. For a relatively modest cost, self-guided tools such as this can keep visitors in the area longer and create stories that get shared among visitors. This is a formula many communities can copy with success!