By Jacob Welker-Fox

Sep 22, 2023

During late September, the first 9th-grade field trip to the National Mall took place. It was a scavenger hunt around downtown DC and the National Mall, and it was a great bonding experience for our advisories. Each advisory competed for points to see who would win the scavenger hunt.  It was very competitive– teams would death-stare each other, eager to compete. 

The whole grade gathers before the scavenger hunt on the national lawn in front of the Washington Monument. Everyone was excited and pumped to start the scavenger hunt– right after this photo was taken all of the advisories ran off to plan how they were going to win.  

Jalil ‘27, a 9th grader on the victorious team, shared his thoughts: “I think it was a very fun bonding  experience for the whole grade and I think it was even better because my advisory won the scavenger hunt it was also fun going around the National Mall to see stuff that I have seen before or have not seen before and spent time with my advisory buddies”  

 All of the groups were having so much fun walking around and completing all the challenges, some were a lot harder than others. Jalil continues:“I was locked in and I think our whole advisory was and we sat there and realized we were not going to lose to these other lame advisories so we ran around to the scavenger hunt checkpoints and we earned some points and took some away from other teams” 

One of the tasks was to approach strangers on the Mall. This caused a lot of anxiety amongst the freshmen.” Nolia, however, did not feel the stress and gained lots of points.

Graham, who was on a losing team, said “even though we lost we had fun.” Many advisories shared Graham’s sentiment, including my own, which was almost last. We had so much fun talking and walking and also completing challenges! It was such a fun experience. 

This team is trying to complete a challenge. They have to all jump off the ground at the same time. All of the teams tried to complete this challenge but this group was one of the lucky ones that could coordinate correctly. 

During the scavenger hunt, Carolyn’s advisory ended up in the native american museum. One of the prompts in the scavenger hunt was to sit in a circle and get a picture of it. After 5 minutes of rearranging everyone, Carolyn’s advisory managed to form an off-center circle and received a couple hundred points to keep them on the leaderboard. 

At this point in the excursion, everyone was tired from walking around DC,and asking strangers for help with a silly scavenger hunt, but it was neck and neck between “Carolyn’s Crusaders” and “Kevin Ford the Win” The freshmen battled it out, running around the mall competing in wild challenges, until KFTW’s pride pushed through  and secured the best prize of them all…bragging rights!

This is The National Mall lawn. This picture was taken a few minutes after all of the groups left

to start the scavenger hunt. This day was very beautiful. It was 67 degrees and sunny. It was a very good day for this scavenger hunt.