Hello friends,
Ditch Day happened on May 25! There have already been quite a few blog posts (both this year and past years) regarding Ditch Day, but I’ll give a brief background for anyone who might not be familiar with it. Ditch Day is a long-held Caltech tradition—it’s a day of puzzles, brute force, obstacle courses, and fun! The seniors work on Ditch Day stacks for the entire year, and it marks their departure from Caltech; they literally ditch campus the morning of and wait for the underclassmen to find them somewhere off campus. There are various themes that eager underclassmen can find in the morning, and stacks can vary from a few people to twenty or more. And by the way, Ditch Day is always “Tomorrow,” with a capital T.
Anyway, let’s get started! There is a curfew (1:00 am for Avery) the night before Ditch Day to ensure that everyone gets enough sleep and energy for a full day of activity. Around 7:40 am, we heard the seniors banging pots and pans and pounding on our doors shouting, “Wake up frosh!” and “It’s Ditch Day!” By convention, people open their doors at 7:45 am so that everyone gets a fair chance to look at the stacks. In Avery, stacks are usually set up in the lounges or courtyard, with a big poster board of artwork and signups. My roommate and I were lucky enough to find a stack we wanted really early on—Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Frosh have priority on stacks, so none of the upperclassmen can start signing until they are fairly certain that all frosh who wanted a stack have signed up; if frosh want to sign up after a stack is full, upperclassmen usually forfeit their spots, although this usually isn’t a big deal—all the stacks are fun! We waited with baited breath for ten or so minutes for all the frosh to sign up, and my friend group (Helena, Tom, Katie, Pamela, and I) snagged the Slytherin team.
Then, there was some downtime to get our Ditch Day shirts (which are designed and silk-screened by the seniors), go to the bathroom (I hadn’t gone since 12:30 the previous night, due to curfew!), and walk around to see the other stacks—there was Kingdom of Hearts, Pixar, Legends of Caltech, and Spongebob. Since seniors are supposed to be off-campus during Ditch Day (in fact, if you find seniors on campus, you are allowed to duct tape them to anything you want, like trees or chairs), Ditch Day puzzles are run by alumni that lead groups of underclassmen to make sure nothing goes awry (and to make sure we can actually solve the problems left behind). Around 8:10 am, the alumni tipped us off that there was commotion in the courtyard, so we all headed over. There were carefully arranged bottles of colored fluids—mimicking the Potions Riddle from The Philosopher’s Stone. There was a neatly rolled scroll with hints regarding which bottle contained what; some bottles would send you home, some would be fatal, some would cause you to sleep, and one would lead you to the next puzzle. Fortunately, between the five of us, we were able to deduce which bottle it was and “drink” it—it was really just milk with food dye.
This led us to the Avery library, where breakfast was waiting! Honestly, I’m not even awake at 8:30 on a regular school day, but I was reminded of my hunger when I saw Einstein bagels and spreads—the maple and smoked salmon are where it’s at. They gave us a long time to eat breakfast, so we got to talk to some alumni and chill. Since I joined Avery this year, I got to meet some new people, so that was pretty cool.
Next, we had a “where’s niffler” (think Where’s Waldo?) puzzle that ended up being a map of campus; we found niffler and headed over to the corresponding part of campus—the lawn behind Braun. It was also at this point that our true mission was revealed—Grindelwald had escaped with Mr. Scamander’s suitcase of magical creatures, and it was up to us to find Grindelwald and the creatures!
At Braun Lawn, there was an obstacle course consisting of potato sack hopping, “the ground’s lava so only jump on certain colors of foam,” a lifesaver floats course, and a ball toss (which took me way too many tries). For those who’ve seen Fantastic Beasts, you also know about the Erumpent mating dance. And yep, the seniors had that planned as part of the obstacle course as well, and we literally did the mating dance (consists of exaggerated pulsing-squats and butt-shaking). It was slightly awkward, but a quality bonding experience. Afterwards, we had a Cuties/Halos slingshot event, where we got to sling mandarin oranges toward poster targets such as Dolores Umbridge, Donald Trump, Obama, etc. (all in good fun, of course). It’s surprisingly hard to aim, even though some of the posters were only 40 feet away. It was also interesting to see how the impact actually sliced through some of the oranges. Anyway, here is a fun picture of us trying to use the orange sling.
At this point, we saw some of the seniors (gasp!) from our stack lurkin’, and we ran for them with duct tape in our hands! We were able to capture Erin (of course, she let us capture her because this tennis team captain could probably outrun all of us), and we happily duct taped her to the tree. We “coerced” her to give us some valuable information, and she handed us a transparency with some mysterious symbols on it.
Anyway, I’ll stop here for now. Stay tuned to discover what this enigmatic transparency was, and how the rest of Ditch Day turned out!
Cheers,
Vic-“bet you never sling shot oranges before”-toria
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