Blogging the Hunt '05: Post 7. Thru SUN. 12:00 PM

EVENT

And by last night, I meant this morning.

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JUDGMENT DAY

ROAD TRIP

We woke up early and drove down to Ida to begin judging.
First, the Judges who had planned the Road Trip judged the Road Trip items.
This was accomplished by dividing the Trip into five "regions," with each judge reviewing items from that region.
Joe judged southern Wisconsin, Christian judged northern Wisconsin, I judged Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, Courtney judged Michigan's eastern Upper Peninsula, and Colin judged Michigan's Lower Peninsula.

There were several of my items that generated positive results among several teams. For example:

Item #118. We found the public beach and the private beach, but we couldn't find the Lake Superior nude beach. Bonus points for using the slides; remember, pants only add friction. [16 points]

Item #74. Show the Collodi Crew at the sites of Big Annie, Big Ernie, and Big Gus. [8, 4, 2 big points respectively]

Item #130. Make Joe's Gym in Marquette a little more average. Force locals into a game of eXtreme Dodgeball at the corner of Spring and 3rd. [4 points/local, 8 locals maximum]

My favorite, however, of the items I judged was:

Item #45. There are many mysteries in life. For example, when was Joseph Long born? When did he die? You can find the answers in Keweenaw's Cliff Cemetery. [15 points]

As one drives north along 41 into the heart of the Keweenaw, they pass a small wooden sign pointing across the highway and into the woods: "Cliff Cemetery." Crossing, one finds a worn but narrow path leading into the birch and conifers, and several hundred feet back, the tombstones start to emerge. There are dozens, some of them all but buried under moss and dead leaves, but some have been meticulously maintained, and are separated from the furrows and ridges by wrought iron fences. These are the graves of miners and lumberjacks who worked and died up there in the 1800s. The numbers on the tombstones reveal how short life could be, and the whole place has an isolation and a silence to it. It's deep enough in that the occasional car running along 41 is unheard.

Joseph Long's tombstone is located at the extreme northwest of the cemetery. In daylight, it shouldn't have taken too long to find, but it's remote enough that teams would not finding it without taking time in the odd hush of that place.

At least this was our intention.

A few teams had adventures with this item. Several teams either read an incorrect sign or misread the sign and headed off the road in the wrong direction, leading them up hills, through forests, and downtowards marshland, before they corrected themselves.

At least one team followed an old two-track marked on a map to get into the cemetery from behind. I guess it goes much further back than I had imagined.

A part of the initial appeal of this road trip was that it left teams on their own. In much of the U.P., there is no cel phone reception, so teams had to rely exclusively on maps, local, and their guts. More than any other item, I think that this road trip was my signature of the list this year.

There's at least one other road trip adventure worth mentioning, though I did not judge it:

Item #214. By letterbox, bring us the mark of Tragedy from the heart of Traverse City. [13 points]

Letterboxing is sort of its own Scavenger Hunt, that consists of hiding boxes or capsules with mementoes and memorabilia in obscure locations, and participants follow clues from the website to the boxes. We were searching for items around the asylum in Traverse City looking for items when we stumbled upon one of these letterboxes. In short, we ran into a problem we should have anticipated when one of the teams read literally "bring us the mark." The didn't bring proof that they had found the mementoes. They brought the actual box.

This would be a story in and of itself, if the team hadn't been so up front about it. As it was, they notified both the judges and other teams of the mistake, and points were adjusted accordingly. And teams have been disqualified for this sort of thing before.

The twist, however, is that later, the Palevsky scene arrived on the site and not finding the box, continued looking. Further into the asylum complex, they found a small canister with a strip of laminated (film? paper? I saw the thing...) with latitute/longitude coordinates. Assuming this was the item, they called their HQ, which directed them to the new location along a series of back roads through the Northern forests. They finally arrived at a massive ditch outside of a small, abandoned industrial complex.

As Sam said the next day, "What if Hoffa was buried there?"

THE SHOWCASE

There were three Showcase items this year. That is, major construction items worth a lot of points:

Item #49. A penny smasher that imprints your team logo onto legal tender coins. [1.99 x 100 points]

I heard extraordinary things about the Shoreland's answer to this item. They converted their trebuchet from the olympics into a sledge hammer driven coin press that impressed everyone who saw it.

Snitchcock had a neat armadillo cast on the end of a bolt, which they tried to imprint on a penny using a mini-sledge. Unfortunately the machinists aim was off somewhat. He struck his thumb twice and got blood all over the place. I tore my (clean) sock into a strip to be used as a bandage. It was the first casualty of my new batch of socks from Target.

Palevsky probably had the most extensive system, which involved using a sledge hammer within a box target. They'd learnt to efficiently shape molds from paperclips and had prepared about a hundred coins with various signs, including their team image (a bunny). They also explained the pros and cons of their system, the changing surface of the metal plates they used, and so on. For being a very simple and straightforward approach, they clearly put a lot of time and thought into their process, and the results showed this.

Item #87. A completely edible movable-type printing press with a complete set of uppercase and lowercase letters. [26 x 4 points. 0.26 bonus points for each additional printable character between Unicode 0021-0040, 005B-0060, or 007B-028F, inclusive; max 100 characters. 13 bonus points if you can print each judge's first and last names simultaneously].

I deferred to other judge's expertise here. The best presses were striking and colorful, and actually very tempting. Most of us couldn't resist eating a couple wedges of Snitchcock press, which was made in several layers, including Starbursts. The F.I.S.T. and Broover also had very tempting looking presses. About a third of the presses we saw were able to legibly render names.

Item #188. Build a calliope. [200 points for this epic item].

Again, I was not able to review every team's calliope, but four stuck out as worth mentioning. The Snell-Hitchcock Calliope was a compact and intricate contraption that didn't work when we saw it. It was pneumatically powered, but the sealant had broken, so the air passage didn't sound. That said, their explanation was compelling.

Broadview had a mechanical calliope that sounded manually. Although the result wasn't very audible, and the tune didn't play through, they had the added innovation of a musical turnstyle, that lifted levers in sequence to play the beginning of the judge theme song. Again, this was an approach we hadn't expected.

The most unexpected of all, however, was F.I.S.T.'s calliope. They heated water in a kettle which ran through a plastic hose and through a flute, which was played by a girl wearing insulated gloves. While I didn't know whether it would fit a technical definition of "calliope," this was the only attempt at steam power, an ultimately proved one of the most versatile and musical.

The best calliope, hands down, however, was Palevsky's. With a life expectancy of just minutes longer than was needed, this calliope had a frame, with tubes connected to plastic recorders (holes tapes shut in sequences to play various notes) mounted on top, and powered by air through a system of tubes that connected inside the box. It played us a song...

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As scavhunt has evolved its become more circumspect and broad in its attempt to appeal to different people for different reasons, without losing its distinctive idiosyncratic flair. Scav Olympics were an opportunity this year for smaller teams with fewer resources to dominate, and their moments of doing so were dramatic. Showcase typically benefits the larger teams, with people, resources, money, and a larger pool of expertise to draw from and this year was more dramatic.

The rest of the list... the small items... are debatably the closest thing to the median.

The rest of Judgment Day will follow.