Katie Henry knows how to make a Skeletor costume under a tight time crunch. Nicholas Cassleman has experience walking on his hands as a circus volunteer. Michael Furdyna doesn’t care if people stop and stare while, dressed as a bird, he imitates a mating dance in the middle of campus.
Those skills don’t typically come in handy at the University of Chicago, but the Scavenger Hunt is anything but typical. This month, about 500 students—and some alumni, and some friends—were handed a list of about 300 tasks to complete. The 11 teams had four nights and three days to fill the frequently cryptic orders.
In keeping with the university’s reputation, many assignments had an intellectual twist. In the “Triethanallenathalon,” students had to perform three actions associated with the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen: tear a deck of cards in half, participate in a swearing contest (“a test of originality and stamina”), and imitate, on a small scale, his “greatest salt-based achievement.” That turned out, research revealed, to have been swinging a 50-pound bag of salt over his shoulder with his teeth.
Teams worked to throw much more manageable, 26-ounce cylinders as far as they could, using their teeth. For another clue, contestants had to figure out what was meant by “follow in the footsteps of Ralph Walbro Emerson and Henry David Thorbreau: write us some transcendentalist broetry or brose.”
“I think with a lot of people, Scav is an excuse to do pretty much anything they want so long as it relates to the item,” Mr. Furdyna said while using sparkly purple cloth and several rods to construct a costume for a clue telling team members to “spray their pheromones, prepare a nesting ground, and perform a mating dance that would make Jack Hanna proud.”
“This is probably not for the self-conscious,” he added.
Scav Hunt began in May 1987 as a student-run, points-based competition between the university’s different housing communities. The original list contained relatively simple items, such as Mickey Mouse ears, a graduate-school rejection letter, and trivia questions about the university. But as Google made finding objects and answers easier, Scav Hunt evolved to include more-complex requests.
Now a team of about 15 student judges spends all year coming up with the list of items—and simple trivia questions are almost nonexistent. Mr. Cassleman, who has volunteered at a local circus, put his experience to use for this instruction: “Starting between University and Woodlawn at noon on Friday, Handwalk Across the Midway.” (That’s about the length of a city block.) While other tasks proved more embarrassing or frustrating, all of them could be completed legally in three days.
The night the list was released—at midnight on a Thursday—hundreds of students crammed into the university’s Ida Noyes Hall. Teams are still typically based on housing communities and stay the same from year to year, though the names change based on inside jokes and pop-culture references. The team from Snell-Hitchcock Hall, went by “The Hitchcocker’s Guide to the Snellaxy.” Among their competition: “Enrico Fermi’s Scarlet Sex Machine” and “The People’s Liberation Front of Scavistan.”
At the stroke of 12, judges dressed in tuxedo T-shirts walked in calmly to a roar of applause. Once each team had its copy of the list, the members rushed back to their dorms and went right to work.
Lyrics, Wigs, and Boxes
The room where the Burton-Judson team worked was filled with materials the students had collected over the year: a pile of cardboard boxes at least five feet high, a collection of ladies’ wigs, several water guns, and some of the lyrics from Les Miz. (“Something you may need is basically anything that goes in a Dumpster that isn’t food or paper,” said Grace Fisher, a co-captain.)
Students grabbed wooden planks, hammers and cardboard tubes to begin some of their assignments—a human-size cat-scratching post, a steam-powered miniature car.
“It feels like the entire university is accessible; everything is within our reach if we think hard enough,” said Seamus Bartlett, a senior majoring in cinema studies, as he created a pair of oversized shoes shaped like crocodile heads. “They wouldn’t give us an impossible item—that’s the theory, and the day they do, that is when we cry and give up.”
Mr. Bartlett and a fellow student got Paul Sereno, a noted paleontologist and University of Chicago professor, to wear the shoes and complete Item 195, “A pair of SuperCrocs worn by a (tasteless) paleontologist.”
In addition to Dumpster-diving, teams raise money—some as much as several thousand dollars—for any additional supplies or purchases they may need to make. But it’s all just for glory: First place is worth a scant $300, or possibly less, depending on how much organizers have left after paying for the competition.
Insane, but We Like It
“It’s a completely crazy thing that you have to be insane to do, but everybody does it,” Ms. Henry said while mulling the pattern of Skeletor’s loincloth at 2 a.m. “We’re all a little insane here, but we like it.”
The costume was for one of four team members assigned to take a road trip, up to 1,000 miles, dressed in costumes dictated by the judges: This year, that meant Skeletor, Vincent Price, Michael Jackson in the “Thriller” video, and a person who was accidentally mummified.
Before they set off, the traveling team members had to deduce which items on the list needed to be completed on the road trip and where to find them. Trips in the past few years have included requests for scores of “world’s largest” and “world’s smallest” items; two years ago in Kansas, one stop was a museum of the world’s smallest imitations of the world’s largest items.
This year, in search of William McKinley’s tomb, the Whitetail Hall of Fame, and the world’s largest paperweight, road-trippers visited Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.
They returned late on Saturday. The next day, participants looked at their competitors’ creations and waited, with a mixture of exhaustion and excitement, to hear from the judges. Teams were awarded points for each completed item, but the number of total points varied based on creativity and effort.
The results were close, but for the fourth straight year, Snell-Hitchcock took first place. Burton-Judson and Max Palevsky tied for second.
“All of it was worth it in that moment; everything had come to fruition,” said Ben Brubaker, Snell-Hitchcock’s co-captain, who collapsed, worn out, several hours later.
After the judging, the teams were left to haul their creations back to their team headquarters. Some were dismantled so parts could be used in future competitions, others were thrown away, and some were kept as souvenirs. The “broetry” inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson remains on team members’ computers. (An opening line to one team’s poem: “By that dude’s fridge that held the Bud, / Their pledge behind the trees hurled, / Here once the sweetest bros had stood, / And did the shots heard round the world.”)
“It’s astounding that so many people can create so many astonishing things in four days,” said a beaming Chris Strange, Burton-Judson’s co-captain, “but it’s so appalling that so many people can create so many useless things in four days.”
Still, if you’ve been looking for some good bird costumes, several students at the University of Chicago may have a lead.