We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
—George Bernard Shaw
New Paltz has long been a town that takes its Halloweens seriously. The annual costume parade down Main Street from the middle school always takes place on October 31, no matter what day of the week it falls on.
But in years like this, when actual Halloween falls on a Tuesday, the spooky action gets into high gear the preceding weekend, with plenty of costumed characters barhopping. So it was that on Friday evening, October 27, it wasn’t immediately clear who was a member of a team participating in the Hunt of New Paltz and who was merely someone partying with friends downtown.
The confusion only added to the fun of this inaugural – and potentially annual – communitywide scavenger hunt. It was hosted by the Gunks Gaming Guild & Café on Church Street and organized by an “underground events network” that calls itself The Wilde Hunt. A couple of dozen downtown businesses agreed to participate, which mainly meant being willing to hand over a clue to a particular team when they showed up with the password they’d just translated. Dozens of volunteers offered their time to help prepare the clues and roleplay non-player characters.
“It’s not really a business — more like a thing that we love doing,” says Miranda Wilde Way, who founded The Wilde Hunt with fellow New Paltz native Noelle Kimble McEntee. The longtime friends were both living in Brooklyn at the time, circa 2015, and lamenting the dearth of opportunities for spontaneous creative fun in New York City. “I said to Noelle, ‘It’s lame to be a grownup,’” says Miranda. So, the two decided to start organizing scavenger hunts for their circle of friends, and soon were in demand for birthdays, web-comic launches, bachelor/bachelorette parties, fundraisers and the like.
Eventually both moved back to their hometown; Miranda — known to many as Moo — recently took the helm as executive director of the Vanaver Caravan. She has a long relationship with the music and dance troupe: She started taking dance lessons with Livia Vanaver as a young girl, and later went on to work for the organization in various capacities. Running the Caravan Kids summer camp program gave her a chance to indulge her passion for organizing scavenger hunt activities on the Fairy Hikes that culminated each camp session.
The inspiration to create trails of clues was in Moo’s blood, it turns out: “It was truly a family pastime.” Her maternal grandfather loved to create scavenger hunts in the 1970s, and also “made ornate puzzle boxes.” Her mother, Lexi Langley, organized scavenger hunts in New Paltz and Kingston in the 1980s, just for fun. “We are a family of logicians, whittlers and puzzle-makers, dreamers, fools, poets and world travelers,” Moo writes in the “About Us” section of The Wilde Hunt’s website, www.thewildehunt.com.
So, The Wilde Hunt is a side project that Moo and Noelle manage to squeeze in alongside full-time jobs and family commitments. But if word gets around how much fun the adventurers had on Friday night’s quest, they might just find themselves deluged with requests for more of its kind.
About 115 players signed up for the fantasy-themed event, most of them dressed in imaginative costumes (though it wasn’t mandatory). We were split up into ten teams of up to 13 “scavengers,” each group given a slightly different assignment and trail of clues. Many of the target destinations overlapped, and occasionally two teams had to battle each other at a particular meeting point. The logistics of planning all this must have been mind-boggling.
This correspondent was assigned to Team Magic, which had members ranging from three months to 70 years. We came away with the Most Challenges Won prize, having bested Team Hero in a bocce match at Runa and Team Trickster in a trivia contest in a parking lot.
Getting from clue to clue to the chocolate “treasure” at the finish was a genuine team effort, tapping our varied skills at acrostic, mathematical and logic puzzles, interpreting cryptic song lyrics, collecting runes off stickers hidden in plain sight on storefronts to crack a code, even devouring a cake at The Bakery to unearth the hint hidden at the bottom. Some of the challenges were fiendishly difficult — such as having to figure out that the black-light keychains we got as prizes at one point needed to be used to read instructions in invisible ink on a clue document for the next step. There were side quests as well (largely involving gnomes, for some inexplicable reason).
Participants earned coupons for a light meal and a couple of drinks at the Gaming Guild once all each team had completed its main quest, followed by an optional afterparty at Huckleberry. The whole shebang ran about seven hours and provided a healthy dose of walking. Mainly, it was more fun than most of us get to have on any normal Friday. By the end of the night, the consensus was clear: We’d all had a blast, and hoped to see more events like it unfolding in New Paltz in the future.
Businesses that supported The Wilde Hunt event include: Lemon Squeeze, Parish, Jar’d, Snug Harbor, Indigo & Velvet, Nettle & Violet, Village Candle, Ritualist, Crust & Magic, Rock & Snow, Dragon Realm, Lagusta’s, Krauss’s, The Bakery, Salix, Isabella’s Treasures, Runa Bistro, Ridge Tea & Spice, Inquiring Minds and Barner Books. Additional support was received from Red Maple Vineyard, Volante Design (co-founder David Volante grew up in New Paltz), the Wayfinder Experience and local drag artist, Veela Peculiar.
To keep abreast of future participatory events sponsored by the Gunks Gaming Guild, sign up for updates at https://gunksgamingguild.com.
Join the family! 
