The scavenger hunt the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery held was a lot of fun.

If you think you are good at answering questions, solving riddles, and cracking clues, and you like Old Town and Fort Collins, then maybe you should put this on your calendar for next year.

The clues for the hunt were really cool. I mean, I didn't try to figure all of them out, because my job was to host, and heckle teams in Old Town while they had fun trying to make heads and tails of the puzzles.

The wild west theme was in full effect, complete with water guns so that people could continually spray me in the face. After we went over some simple rules, we released a group of about 150 people into Old Town.

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I wondered if the clues were going to be too difficult for the crowd, but one team got all of them right, and many were competitive turning in most of the answers.

It was obvious they were engrossed by the way they had their heads in their cluebooks, how they conferred, and in the way all of them made it back on time to see how they did.

Since it is a fundraiser, the FCMOD offers chances for teams to literally buy all the clues. There was one team that chose to do that, then went and made sure that the alcohol was working properly in a few of the local saloons. Very good times.

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The clues were tough, here is an example, written by Brent Carmack, with great pride and effort.

There is a storefront on the street of the Johnson the President,

With three services offered (one of them odd, it will become evident).

You might ask, why does one strike you as odd?

Let me ask you, have you ever seen Sweeney Todd?

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street made a living cutting more than hair,

Turning his customers into meat pies, does that seem very fair?

Again, you might ask, what makes this particular salon so scary?

The name's bad enough, no bones about it, but the location is really what makes me wary.

Tell me where you need to go to enter this establishment,

Can you blame me for being a little reticent?

When it came down to it, it was all about supporting the Museum and its programs. That takes money, so they were selling the answers to clues.

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It's analogous to what the Museum does in real life--sells answers to clues. I mean, not directly, but isn't part of any modern museum's function to help us sort out the clues that allow us to make sense of what's happened in the past so we can act in the present to affect the future?

 

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