Salina Arts & Humanities announces that the winner of the 2021 Festival Medallion Quest is Heike (‘HIKE-ee’) Daily.
With help from two of her sons, including local son Brad and son Aaron of Peachtree City, Georgia, along with granddaughter Tess, Daily found the 2021 Medallion at about 12:30 p.m. on Sunday, August 22.
The Medallion was a grey-colored box with a sliding lid, placed under the base of a lamp post located just south of the “Trifinity” sculpture in the green spaces of the Salina City-County building.
Daily has searched every year since the Quest began in 2009, originally with her sister. On Sunday, as she looked with help from her family, “All of a sudden, we saw the lampposts that looked like a moon, and noticed were in a straight line,” says Daily. “Then across from them was the “new and old” courthouses, which led us to look again at the lampposts. Then, we realized that “the missing eight” was Eighth Street, which ends south of the courthouse.”
Daily is the 15th winner of the Festival Medallion Quest that was started in 2009 by the Smoky Hill River Festival. The Festival Medallion Quest’s goal is to foster creativity and connectivity in a way that reflects the spirit of the River Festival.
The 2021 Quest took nearly five days and returned to the “old” or previous format of two daily written-only clues, shared online at festivalmedallionquest.com and posted outside the Eighth Street SAH office doors.
In 2019, a graphic-clue style Quest lasted five days, with mother-daughter duo Gwenna Reich (“Rich”) and daughter Tara Sauber (“SAW-ber”) finding the Medallion, which was a metal tube attached to a rock placed in the fountain at Sunset Park.
The 2018 Medallion, found by Lynn Brown Larsen and MelodyHoeffner, was a custom-designed cassette tape and box, hidden near a trail in Indian Rock Park. In 2017, winner Eric Carlson found a tree bark-shaped Medallion off of east Cloud Street in the River Woods Nature Trail, a newer Salina park.
To view the full set of Festival Medallion Quest clues, go to festivalmedallionquest.com and click on the Clues page.
The 2021 Quest winner receives a prize package of $1,000 in cash and $1,000 in Gift Certificates to be used for shopping at the RiverFestival 2021 Fine Art and Craft Show. Other prizes include four Festival admission Wristbands, Festival water bottles, a complimentaryon-grounds VIP parking pass, an invitation for four to the Thursday-evening PREMIERE Art Patron party, some 45th-anniversary gator-style Festival bandannas and four River Festival 2021 T-shirts.
The Smoky Hill River Festival, now in its 45th year, is the flagship event of Salina Arts & Humanities, a department of the City ofSalina. The River Festival draws many local residents and out-of-town guests each year to Salina, to enjoy outdoor art installations, the Fine Art and Craft Show, four stages of live entertainment, the Artyopolis kid’s area, Festival food and more. The River Festival generates approximately $3.5 million in revenue each year, within the local community.
Advance-price, four-day Festival Wristbands are available until late Tuesday, August 31 at about 40 Salina locations and in 18 other regional cities. Children 11 and under get in FREE.
For more information on the Festival Medallion Quest or the Smoky Hill River Festival, call 785-309-5770 or visit riverfestival.com.
