Eighth Annual Hunt Starts Today

For 72 hours, starting this morning, the campus will be consumed by an unusual tradition: a massive scavenger hunt. The stakes: $1,000 in cash.

The Hunt is a three-day competition that might be better described as a team-based search-and-discover creative improvisational game. Two Hunt masters compile 100-plus clues, which range from building a Rube Goldberg machine to recording an interview with someone from the Class of 1975.

The Hunt is the brainchild of former president Ronald Liebowitz and his wife, Jessica, who started Middlebury’s Programs on Creativity and Innovation in the Liberal Arts (PCI). In 2007, the Liebowitzes called a working group of five faculty members to brainstorm extracurricular programming that would encourage creative problem solving among students.

At a meeting in summer 2007, the so-called “committee on innovative competition” resolved to create a competition “different than many that we have heard about at other schools.”
“Ours will be deliberately broad in scope as to reflect innovation in a liberal arts environment,” the committee continued. They decided upon the scavenger-hunt format and juggled a few names for the competition — the J-term Chase, the Middlebury Mystery and Mystbury — before settling on a final name: the Hunt.

“The Hunt connects people,” said Elizabeth Robinson ’84, who has overseen PCI since its inception. “Students become really close because they are together for those three days and they are so intense and competitive.”

The first Hunt was held in Jan. 2008. It returned the following two years, but failed to happen in 2010. In 2011, after the winter without a Hunt, two seniors, Ben Wessel ’11 and Taryn Tilton ’11, approached Robinson, telling her they wanted to resurrect the competition. She happily complied.

The duo introduced several new aspects to the game in order to revitalize the competitive spirit and encourage more student participation. They encouraged more photo and video documentation in order to enable off-campus students to participate. Wessel and Tilton’s resuscitating efforts were successful. That year, the Campus published an article titled “The Hunt Comes Back With a Bang.” And since 2011, the Hunt has gone on every year.

The clues are designed to encourage Middlebury students to solve problems they would never encounter in a classroom, to create connections with other people and places and to celebrate Middlebury’s institutional and student culture. Per tradition, the Hunt masters develop clues that encourage participants to engage with professors, administrators, staff members, town residents and each other. To win, some say a team need a nice balance of talents. Not everyone has to be artistic or musical or good at singing or shameless in public, but a winning team “just needs a good mix of all of those things,” according to Colin Boyle ’18.

Successful Hunt teams have highly organized systems of communication and coordination — think iMovie, Google Docs and GroupMe. They are known for checking out video cameras and chargers from Davis Family Library. Some teams prepare extensive analysis of the clues, drafting spreadsheets that show point values, levels of difficulty, and how many hands are needed to complete the maximum number of clues most efficiently.

In recent Hunts, social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram have become integral to the competition, even when the Hunt masters do not specifically include them in the clue list. Students are known to continually refresh their computers in anticipation of the Hunt clues being released.

The Hunt masters for this year are Winson Law ’16 and Janessa Gonzalez ’17, the winners of the 2015 competition under the team name “Trial By Combat.”
When asked what is new for this year, Law said he could barely decide.

“Janessa and I have been digging up old Hunt clues and doing our own take on them to show what the Hunt is about,” Law said. “We’ve eaten jabanero peppers and interviewed each other, Eskimo kissed all five CRAs, and just filmed a lip dub to Ke$ha’s ‘We R Who We R.’ These clues reminded us why the Hunt is so remarkable: it pushes us outside our comfort zone, gives us a creative outlet, and makes for some pretty great memories.”

The duo is also bringing back Commons Clue challenges, which were absent in past years but were part of the original competition. Each Commons has provided its own clue and a matching $100 prize, which is separate from the main Hunt list.

“We want every student to participate in the Hunt in some shape or form,” Law said. “So often, we’re stuck in the same academic, extracurricular, and social routines. But once a year we can break out of our routines and do something entirely different.”

Law was adamant about one thing: by the time people read this article on Thursday, it is still not too late to join the Hunt. Teams of two to ten should submit “anything and everything” for consideration.

The winning team will receive a $1,000 grand prize, and can choose to split the money as its members wish. The second-place team will receive a $100 consolation prize.

For information on the Hunt, and for tips on the game posted daily, visit middleburyhunt.com.