Originally posted by Entertainment Weekly on February 16, 2016. View original article.
SAMANTHA HIGHFILL @SAMHIGHFILL
POSTED ON MAY 19, 2017 AT 2:48PM EDT
For those Supernatural fans that haven’t recovered from the season 12 finale and just want to know that Misha Collins is okay, we have good news: Registration is open for the seventh annual GISHWHES, which stands for Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen.
The scavenger hunt, which is the brainchild of Collins and has broken multiple Guinness World records, features teams from all over the world as they take on a list of more than 200 items, completing what they can and posting photos and videos to the GISHWHES website. This year’s hunt takes place August 5-12, with the winning team earning a trip to Hawaii with Collins.
As for the purpose of the hunt, GISHWHES partners with charities — including Collins’ Random Acts — to do good. “We’ve been continually growing every year, the number of people participating in GISHWHES and by extension, we’ve been continuing to expand the positive influence that we’ve been able to have,” Misha Collins tells EW, calling in from his final day in Iceland, which was the winner’s trip from the last hunt. “Last year, one of the items we put in the hunt was to help this family of Syrian refugees in Lebanon that had an incredibly heartbreaking story: The daughter in the family had actually tried to kill herself twice so there would be enough food for the other kids in her family,” he says. “I just got a photo two days ago of them in their new apartment with a message that the girl that had tried to kill herself now says she wants to be a doctor. And that’s all from this weird little scavenger hunt — we actually found them a home and we did that for a bunch of refugee families.”
With registration now open for this year’s hunt, Collins and his team are hard at work finding charities to work with and of course, picking activities. (Spoiler: Expect more puzzles!) “It’s kind of amazing. This little online scavenger hunt started as a lark and now it’s taken me to these winners trips all over the world, and we have people from 100 different countries participating and it’s pretty cool,” Collins says. “I’m proud that this fandom has coalesced around this game that actually does some good things for people.”
For more on GISHWHES, watch the video above.