I went on a real life treasure hunt. This is what I discovered
A few weeks ago, a video game designer and a musician hid treasure somewhere in the forests of the Northeastern U.S.
Over the course of about two weeks, thousands of people from all around the world joined the hunt.
It’s called Project Skydrop. The treasure? A golden trophy and pot of prize money, the value totaling more than $100,000.
So, of course, I joined the hunt.
Here’s how it works
By the time I had even heard about Project Skydrop, thousands of people had already been analyzing clues and hitting the trails, scouring the forest floors for treasure.
The setup of the game is relatively simple. The clues start by showing a map of the eastern U.S., with a circle spanning an area from roughly New Hampshire all the way to Washington, D.C.
Over three weeks, the width of the circle shrinks from 500 miles to just 1 foot.
Every day, you also get an aerial photo showing more and more of the forest surrounding the prize.
The treasure is a gold trophy that comes with a key to redeem a pot of prize money that grows as people join.
When I signed up, the search area was down to a 95-mile wide circle, centered on western Massachusetts.
I went to Google Maps, thinking if I clicked around, maybe I could line up the aerial shots with the circle, pinpoint where the treasure was and head out into the forest to collect the prize.
It was exciting at first — I was searching for gold treasure!
But there’s so much forest in a 95 mile circle, and to me, it all looked the same. The circle was still way too big, and I soon realized that as it got smaller, it’d get easier… Not just for me, but for everyone else too.
Within a few hours, I went from feeling super stoked to feeling completely hopeless that I would be the one taking home the prize.
So I called up some other treasure hunters to ask how their searches were going.
“I'm not really hopeful that I'll find it. But I just want to say that I participated, you know, boots on the ground looking around,” said Jared Lyon, a 46-year-old from Rochester, N.Y. who is very involved in the online treasure hunter community.
“I’ve been doing these things for so long … some of the past ones took 17 years to be found.”
If a veteran treasure hunter wasn’t feeling optimistic, what chance did I have?
Hunter Aptaker, a 25-year-old from New Salem, Mass., was more hopeful about his chances. And he still had that burning sense of adventure I had quickly lost.
“I grew up a huge Indiana Jones guy. So I think this kind of struck a little childhood memory inside of me,” he said.
“I have a memory of when my cousin used to babysit. We'd set up this little gold statue in the corner of the room, take off all the couch cushions and make our own kind of Temple of Doom situation. So it's interesting to have something like this … you get to put yourself in those shoes and live out those childhood memories.”
It’s designed to build tension
Despite Aptaker’s enthusiasm, I was not feeling any better about my chances. So I wondered if I could give myself an edge and go straight to the source: the guys who created Project Skydrop.
That’s Jason Rohrer, a video game designer, and Tom Bailey, a musician. They grew up together and have been creative partners on the project.
They didn’t give me any inside information, sadly, and said that at the end of the day, the treasure hunt is about creating a sense of adventure.
“We're trying to cultivate … this feeling of kind of wonder and awe,” Roher said.
“And so the interesting thing about Project Sky Drop compared to the other treasure hunts is it goes through this kind of arc of unsolvable to solvable gradually over time.”
This design, he says, is supposed to ratchet up the tension towards the end and create an exciting, mad scramble for the prize.
But early this week, only 13 days into the game, Dan Leonard found the treasure. Leonard, a meteorologist, used weather data embedded in a live camera feed of the prize.
"I analyzed any time where it was sunny and any time where it was cloudy and sort of lined that up to possible areas where it could be, so I slowly whittled it down. It was a process of elimination," he told WCVB 5.
Still, a lot of the participants I talked to said they didn’t necessarily need to find treasure to enjoy the game.
“I have found lots of really great mushrooms. I found, you know, some cool insects. I've seen amazing things,” Michal Strawbridge, a 45-year-old living in Carrington, Mass. told me.
“Today I went out and there was a good, strong wind that blew through the trees. And all of the leaves started just slowly falling down. And it was absolutely magical.”
I talked to her before the treasure was found, and she said she was just happy people were getting out into nature.
Project Skydrop is continuing with a competition for a second place prize. The runners up won’t get the gold or the jackpot, but maybe the real treasure was the experiences we had along the way.
At least, that’s what I tell myself.
