Questival 2016

Last weekend was the Cotopaxi Salt Lake City Questival. Aaron and I have participated all three years since it started. Cotopaxi is an outdoor gear company, and Questival is a 24-hour scavenger hunt/adventure race. We were on a team with Aaron's brother, sister, and sister's husband. We had a great time. Aaron compiled all of the challenges into a video:

Just for fun, here's a little more detail on a couple of highlights of the event.

Mohawk

I don’t like the Mohawk. It is an extreme and ridiculous hairstyle, the main point of which is to gain attention. Let's leave the “Faux hawk” out of this discussion. I’m talking about blatant shaving and spiking. In particular, I’ve never understood how some parents give young children a Mohawk haircut. Do they think it is cute? Do they want their kid to look tough? Do they love Rufio from the movie Hook? Have they personally always wanted a Mohawk, and now they live through their child? Mohawks are only acceptable on rare occasions, such as for Halloween costumes… and Questival.

Aaron has needed a haircut for weeks.

One of the Questival challenges was to give a team member a Mohawk. Around midnight, we found ourselves back at our apartment, and I shaved Aaron’s head, leaving the middle strip for a Mohawk. It was pretty fun to just shave without having to be careful. Aaron spiked it and used a wax product to keep it in place. It looked awesome. It was pretty funny to see other teams’ reactions when they saw it: “Wait, you actually did that challenge?” “You got a Mohawk for one point?” “Are you in first place?” Yes, we were a bit disappointed that we only earned one point from the Mohawk challenge (on a scale of 1-12), but, as I suggested before, the main point of a Mohawk is to gain attention.

Therefore, I would say it was actually worth two points.

 Little Black Hole

One of the events was to take a photo “from the highest vantage point you can access for free”.  Aaron’s brother likes to get on the roof of any building possible, so he became our guide. He has been on the Grand America Hotel, so we followed him. But the roof access was locked. Unfortunately, it was a one-way stairwell with no access to the floors. So we climbed down twenty-four flights of stairs until we came out at ground level. We tried again a different way. Again, the roof was locked, but this time we were smart enough to hold the door open to leave the stairwell. We talked to an employee. She said she didn't have a key. We looked for a person with a key. No luck.

So we crossed the street to Grand America's less affluent child, Little America. 

Getting to the roof was easy: Up the elevator, up the stairs, and *woot-woot* roof access! We snapped a picture and planned to head to the stairwell, back out the way we came. But the door from the stairwell to the hotel was locked. In our excitement to find the roof unlocked, we didn't keep the door open. We tried and failed to open other doors. Apparently, it was another one-way stairwell. We had been swallowed alive by Little America. We weren’t super enthusiastic about retreating down seventeen more flights of stairs, but it was our only option. Little America is like a living organism, and the stairwell is the digestive system. No shortcuts. We would have to completely pass through. And it was hot in there. After a seventeen-floor descent, we were met with an ominous sign on the ground-level exit door: Alarm Will Sound. Really? They won’t let us leave without evacuating the entire hotel? This is pretty extreme. Little America’s stairwell is actually a monster, perhaps more accurately known as Little Black Hole or Baby Death Trap. You can get in this thing, but you cannot get out.

Why did a casual stairwell exit merit an emergency alarm? Did they really think a fire is the only reason a human would be in this stairwell? For the record, I have taken many opportunities to use stairs rather than ride an elevator. Any novice blogger could write a post called “10 Hacks for a Healthier Lifestyle”, and I almost guarantee that “take the stairs whenever possible” will be in the top three, along with “park your car on the distant edge of every parking lot”.  If I’m staying at a hotel, and my genuine desire is to improve my health by powering up and down the stairs, the hotel should allow that.

Even so, we didn’t really want to set off a fire alarm. Evaluating our options for survival and escape, someone suggested we cross the roof to the other stairwell. This meant climbing back to the roof SEVENTEEN STORIES ABOVE. Then we somehow all got split up. Some knocked on doors along the way, some flew up the steps, some considered phoning the hotel's front desk. The stairwell was getting toasty. I made it to the roof and crossed to the other stairs. Then we began another descent. I tried a few doors on the way down. Finally, I found an unlocked door: a beacon of hope. It was not an exit, but it led to a balcony. I inhaled some delicious fresh air. Aaron's brother called, saying that he found a way out. I went back to the stairs and finally to the ground level, where I emerged from the Little America stairwell monster. After a series of texts and phone calls, our team was finally reunited. Then we ate Oreos.

Why have health enthusiast guests not yet complained about the restrictive and deadly stairwells at Little America? Our experience suggests that the true cause of steadily rising obesity rates may be the fear that a simple "healthier lifestyle" routine could morph into an hour-long, unplanned Stairmaster workout trap.