Scav Hunt - The World's Largest Scavenger Hunt

The University of Chicago is known for being a mecca for Nobel Laureates, particularly button-down economists of the Milton Friedman school. However, despite its conservative scholarly image, UC students go just a little bit wacko for four days every spring for what some claim to be the world's largest scavenger hunt.

University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt

The "Scav Hunt", as it's called by participants, was founded in 1987 by Chris Straus, who with Cassie Scharff, Diane Kelly, Nolan McCarty, and Rick Jeffries created and organized a long outrageous list of tasks. Unlike events like University of Michigan's Naked Mile, the organizers of UC's Scav Hunt are sanctioned by the university as an extracurricular group. The organizers of Scav Hunt also act as "Judges" for each task on the list.

Participants are divided into teams representing dorms and student organizations. As of 2007, there were well over 300 teams in the game.

In the early years of the Scav Hunt, the tasks and individual scavenger items were located around the University of Chicago campus. In recent years, tasks and item have been scattered in locations across North America.

Outrageous Scav Hunt Items

Points are awarded to teams according to the difficulty of each individual item and tasks. Some of the more outrageous retrievable scavenger hunt items have included five MENSA membership cards, a tenured professor willing to recite lyrics from a gangsta rap song, a piñata filled with fresh raw clams, Chicago Bulls season tickets, a garden weasel, a Hari Krishna, a vat of molten chocolate, and an edible iMac. Some of the most outrageous team tasks have included getting circumcised, building a house of cards in a bottle, getting a photo of a teammate with Monica Lewinsky, making a gingerbread house of ill repute, finding an incorrect Trivial Pursuit card, retrieving one passport stamped by all three of George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" countries, and creating a plutonium-producing reactor (a team actually produced a low-level one).

The Scav-Olympics

Each year, the University of Chicago Scav Hunt's end event is the Scav-Olympics, a string of twelve (give or take) events. Examples of the more supremely outrageous events:

• Find the tallest person you can find within a specified period of time. Your tall person must be taller than the other teams' tall person.

• Build a sipping straw that reaches to a dorm's top deck and then a team member must suck up to a liter of water from that top deck.

• Modify a can of shaving cream so it propels the cream further than any other team.

• Spin in place until all other competitors have either quit or fallen down.

• Win a footrace where the runners' feet are in watermelons.

• A team member must eat more squeezable cheese products than anyone else.

• In the Plumber's "Luge", participants race on a skateboards, propelling themselves with two plungers.

The Scav Hunt Road Trip

The Road Trip is a fairly recent Scav Hunt event where participants are sent around the country to do weirdo tasks, plus take photos of odd places and people doing odd things, such as tourists hugging the base of the St. Louis Arch; meeting comic Yacov Smirnoff in Branson, Missouri; and delivering a statue of Bill Clinton to the William J. Clinton Presidential Park in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the 2007 Scav Hunt, participants covered eight states, going as far west as Colorado and Wyoming.