Would you travel halfway across the country — about 1,400 miles — to search for hidden treasure?
Jason Stride would — in fact, this is his third year doing so.
“It’s just so much fun,” says Stride of our newspaper’s annual tradition, officially called the Love Your Melon Presents Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt.
Stride currently lives in Portland, Oregon, but he first learned about this quest when he lived in St. Paul.
“I found out about the hunt in 2014 from the news coverage,” Stride says. “And then I stumbled across the chat board on the Pioneer Press page.”
It was fun to get caught up in the adventure.
“My girlfriend and I went out looking with a soup ladle and a golf club,” says Stride.
They got close to that elusive medallion; very close.
“The next day they found it,” he says. “We said, ‘Oh, my gosh, that was right where we were digging!'”
The enchantment had begun.
“I got the bug,” he says.
It was also a way for the Oregon transplant to learn about his adopted community.
“I started studying clues from past hunts,” he says. “When the hunt was not going on, in the summer, I’d pay attention to statues in parks. I studied all the streets and street names around the city. I started reading history. You kind of get obsessed with it. It’s like falling down a rabbit hole.”
He might now be more familiar with his surroundings than some of us who have always lived here.
“As a bonus,” he says, “you go walking around the city now and the city looks different to you because you know so much more about it. You know that so-and-so lived here at this time, and you can picture how things used to look. Every street has a meaning to you now — because you know it’s not just a random name, but you know about the person it was named after.”
Stride moved back to Oregon in 2017: “All my family is there,” he says.
There’s just something about us, though …
“I really love St. Paul,” says Stride. “It has this homey, romantic feeling to it. Just to get a chance to come here in the winter — winter is a thrill to me out here. It’s gorgeous and cozy. It’s worth it to me to use my vacation time to do this.”
So once again, Stride, 37, has taken time off from his job at a shipping company to pursue that medallion. This is his seventh hunt — and the third one he’s flown in for from Oregon. While he’s here, he stays at an Airbnb near Hamline University, takes public transportation or, if the search gets really cold or remote, rents a U-Haul pickup to get around town.
Let’s forget about the expense of such a trip, which might eventually outpace the potential purse of $10,000; some do think it’s odd to vacation in Minnesota in January.
“People ask me, ‘Why don’t you go lay on a beach?'” he says. “That sounds so boring to me. Why would I want to lay on a beach when I could be wearing five layers, roaming a park in the middle of the night with a headlamp on, being hot on the thrill of the chase?”
Jason Stride is featured in our highlight reel from the 2019 Treasure Hunt.
Tough to explain that one to Oregonians, perhaps. Or perhaps not.
“Even though I grew up in Portland, I didn’t realize until I lived in St. Paul that there’s a treasure hunt associated with the Portland Rose Festival,” he says. “And it’s based off the St. Paul hunt.”
It’s not the same, though; perhaps because the bonding is not as extreme when it comes to roses in June. Instead of a few thorns, our hunt offers friendship forged through the potential of frostbite.
“The coolest thing is all the people you meet,” says Stride, “people who are just as into it as you are, strangers who become instant friends as you hunt in parks and work together through the night.”
Copyright 2020 Pioneer Press.