SLIDESHOW

The Mulberry Thicket was tough to get through and the sad horse had sad news for several teams in yesterday's Great Richmond Region Adventure challenge.

But the agent on the terrace was probably the biggest hurdle for the 100 people who went dashing through the streets of the Fan District and downtown to follow clues in the second annual running of the combination scavenger hunt and brainteaser race.

At stake was a $2,500 prize for the winning team, with another $2,500 for a favorite charity -- as well as a chance to "be a tourist in your hometown," said Jack Berry, president and chief executive officer of the Richmond Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau. The bureau and the Richmond Times-Dispatch hosted the challenge.

But maybe just as rewarding was translating a rhyme about the Mulberry thicket and Arnold's picket, where "a number waits to sing/for brilliant minds to figure out/a clever way to ring."

"I know it. I know it," Victoria Shubert shouted as a teammate unfurled the rolled-up map and poem-clues that sent about 27 teams on their three-hour chase.

"That's my apartment building!"

The Mulberry thicket and the stone declaring "Arnold's Picket Driven In" -- the spot where Virginia militiamen, the story goes, defeated Benedict Arnold -- must be the corner of Mulberry Street and Grove Avenue, she figured.

The number? Was it 1781 -- the date of the supposed battle? Was it 1834 -- when the stone marker at the corner was erected?

"This is my apartment building," Shubert said. "But I don't know what to do."

She'd missed the little inch-wide sticker on the back of Mulberry's one-way traffic sign, with a phone number to call for a critical clue.

But for 6-foot-6-inch Graham Cathey, of a three-person team of Varina friends, it was a piece of cake.

"Right at eye level," he said of the sticker.

"Sometimes, you luck out. Sometimes you don't," teammate Ambur Willis said.

Andy Monaco of the winning "Three-Dollar Bills No. 1" team, a group of six football-playing friends who directed their donation to Maymont, also spotted the sticker. Monaco's five teammates were Shannon Timberlake, Christy Sheppard, Josh Pearson, Billy Chappell and Becky Loos.

And they made it past the daunting agent on the terrace. When they dialed the phone number on the sticker, that was whom the recorded message told them to seek.

The agent's challenge: sheets of paper with a grid of 13 columns and 28 rows of apparently random letters. It defeated several groups, some of whom struggled for more than half an hour before giving up and accepting the 20-minute time penalty that came with seeking help. Teams needed the answer -- "John Smith" -- to move on to the final phase of the chase.

But while the Three-Dollar team figured out the sad horse right away -- the riderless, head-hanging bronze memorial to the Civil War horse in front of the Virginia Historical Society -- the clues in the museum, including a portrait of Virginia's last British governor, its civil-rights heroes and Rose Kennedy, didn't add up. They had to call for help.

Shubert caught on to the sad horse -- just a couple of blocks from home, after all -- but finished the race kicking herself about the number outside her apartment building -- the only clue she missed.

"I'll never look at that sign the same way," she said.
Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051 or dress@timesdispatch.com.