By: Kate Lewis ’18 and Molly Mahoney ’18

Surrounded by a lumberjack, sign language interpreters and children entertainers, Tia Pogue ’17 and her 15 person group, Team Raised from Perdition, were victors in the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen (GISHWHES) that took place in August 2016.
GISHWHES is a seven time Guinness World Record breaking competitive scavenger hunt founded by actor Misha Collins, best known for his role in the show “Supernatural.” This year’s reigning champions will embark on a free trip to Iceland with Collins in May. Plus, GISHWHES and Team Raised from Perdition will be featured in a Yahoo mini series they recently filmed in Vancouver, Canada.
“I was really surprised when our team, that had only been runner-up for one year, won,” Pogue said. She explained that typical winners are “better established, they have a bunch of social media followers, have networks of people already and they’re very well practiced.”
Pogue is eager to meet Collins and her fellow scavengers, who live across the United States and in Canada and Brazil. “The actual itinerary is a total surprise. They won’t tell us anything […]. There will be plenty of shenanigans, I hear,” Pogue said.
Pogue applied and was accepted into Team Raised from Perdition after stumbling upon their ad on Reddit.
Although Pogue was the youngest on her team, she took on one of the hardest of the 174 possible scavenger hunt items: to send a letter addressed to the universe into space and catch it on video.
When the weather balloon carrying the letter got blown off course and landed in a tree in Salisbury, Connecticut the day before school started, team member Christine Gervais drove three kids from Chicago, Illinois to Connecticut to retrieve it. “She had to send her 13-year-old son, who is a rock climber, up to the top of a fifty foot tree to get the balloon,” Pogue said, laughing.
Pogue was also highly involved with the hunt’s artistic challenges. “We had to recreate an iconic photograph entirely out of junk food. I did the African refugee on the National Geographic cover out of Twizzlers, Oreos, chips, Doritos and M&Ms.”
The challenges fall into three categories: random acts of kindness, weird art and wacky tasks.
Pogue completed 23 items in the allotted week, and her team collectively completed 171 of the 174 total items, earning them first prize in the international competition against an estimated 40,000 participants.
Although Pogue is competitive in the hunt, she emphasized there is “something for everyone. While there are definitely teams like mine who are trying to win the whole thing and the trip, a lot of people don’t try to complete the entire list.”
GISHWHES aims to forge lifelong relationships between people from all walks of life while still encouraging charity and fun. “The experience was really cool because I was constantly in contact with people from all over the world,” Sophie Betar ’18, who also competed in the scavenger hunt, said.