Students duke it out in campus wide scavenger hunt
A 2007 Subaru Forester blitzed across Mount Pleasant Friday night.
It tore into local businesses’ driveways and almost immediately peeled out again.
“I have not sped tonight,” said the driver, Dan Martinez-DuCharme. “I just get to the speed limit fast.”
The Ohio freshman who grew up in Long Island, N.Y., was teamed with Harrison freshman Nick Sonnenberg.
They were Wheeler Hall’s only “vehicle team” in the 2010 “Mission Impossible” scavenger hunt.
The competition challenged students in residence halls to form teams and answer as many questions as possible out of a list of 500 in a 3-hour time period.
One question asked how many lit up depictions of Col. Sanders the KFC on Mission Street had outside.
“I know how many kings there are!” Sonnenberg said, eager to scribble the answer and get on to the next question.
“That’s the colonel, dude,” Martinez-DuCharme responded.
The majority of halls were represented by their own team and the maximum number of participants in a given team was 40. Wheeler Hall had 15.
The hunt opened at 9 p.m. and the teams had until midnight to find the answers. They included several Central Michigan University or Mount Pleasant trivia items as well as music-related factoids, following the music theme of this year’s hunt.
Steve Wincent, a Brooklyn senior and chairman of the Mission Impossible Committee, said tasks included finding how many windows are on the south side of Finch Hall and listing the names of all The Beatles.
Damon Hunter was one of the “scouters” on the team, charged with finding answers to cross-campus questions.
The Grayling freshman put in a little more sacrifice than he bargained for- he cut his scalp open on a fence as he dashed through a stand of bushes.
“I bled for this team!” Hunter said.
He said he was alright as he took the rest of the night easy on the couch at “home base” in the office of Sara Olsztyn, Wheeler’s residence hall director.
There, participants like Davison freshman Kylie Wernholm coordinated the efforts of the team and used tools like Google Maps Street View to find answers from afar.
“It’s good to establish a home base where we can spread our knowledge to the rest of the team,” she said.
Despite the Wheeler team’s best efforts, the victory, and the T-shirt prizes, went to Larzelere Hall.
“Having all honors students was a perk,” said co-captain Sam Fleming, an Allen Park junior.
Though she said her team answered all 500 questions, there were a few that gave them trouble, such as where to find a canine acupuncturist in Mount Pleasant.
