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Adam Zurn ’01 spent more than 1,000 hours creating each of the 15 treasure hunts that are featured on his website Uncharted Lancaster. Lime Kiln Adventure, for instance, takes explorers on a half-mile hike to learn about Lancaster County’s lime kilns at Silver Mine Park in Conestoga. The reward for completing the journey is a treasure cache Zurn creates through 3D printing.
“It’s the ‘National Treasure meets local history’ of geocaching, only better,” Zurn says. “All adventures hold the promise of finding hidden treasure at the end.”
Zurn also offers guided tours, hikes and educational presentations on Lancaster County history. His goal is to take people off the beaten path to discover history through adventure. “There are two sides,” he says. “There’s the local history side and then there’s the adventure side, which gives you an incentive to go and visit a place. Taking kids for a walk can be a tough sell, but they’ll walk four miles to get a plastic coin out of a hidden gold box.”
From ‘The Goonies’ to the Classroom
Zurn grew up in the ’80s watching movies like “Indiana Jones,” “The Goonies” and “National Treasure.” He also spent a good deal of time exploring outdoors near his home in Susquehanna County, which he shared with his parents who were both teachers.
“We spent a lot of summers traveling all over the country learning,” Zurn says. “When you’re young, you don’t really appreciate that. It feels like punishment.” It took years before he realized that those trips instilled in him an appreciation and love for local history.
Zurn came to Lancaster County in 1997 to attend Millersville University. Having toured several other colleges, he decided on Millersville because of his passion for technology. “What sold me was that every residence room had internet access,” he says.
An undecided major, he initially had no interest in being a teacher like his parents. Then he stumbled upon the University’s technology education major. “I ended up taking the classes and enjoyed it,” he says. He earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in technology education, as well as a master’s degree in leadership and learning from Millersville.
Zurn is now in his 24th year of teaching technology at Lampeter-Strasburg High School, where he serves as department head. His wife, Maribeth, also a Millersville graduate, teaches first grade at Conestoga Elementary in Penn Manor School District, where his son is a student.
A Good Side Hustle
As a transplant to Lancaster County – “I came in 1997 and never really left” – Zurn spent a good deal of time researching the area and its history. When a neighbor asked if he had seen the cemetery near Shenks Ferry, which is by his home, he set out on a quest. “I looked it up on the internet then decided to physically find this graveyard,” he says. “I eventually found it, and I learned a lot along the way. I thought others might enjoy that same kind of experience.”
That’s how Zurn began creating adventures that teach explorers a little bit of local history. “I’d start by asking, ‘Why is this road called this? Why is this building called what it is?’ Researching something always brought up two more questions and more things to look into,” he says.
Zurn calls his work “a good side hustle. I give tours in the summer and take groups out on kayak trips and history hikes. It’s a great hobby to fill my time.” And he raises money – he estimates $15,000 so far – for the Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster County through an annual treasure hunt he hosts.
Last summer, he published a book, “Ghosts, Monsters and Tales of Adventure,” that is a compilation of the 64 tales about Lancaster County he has written and published on his website. And he’s working on another book that includes 50 of Lancaster County’s strange stories and hidden places. Much of the heavy work for the books is already done, Zurn says, because the stories were written for his website. “Now, it’s just about editing them to work,” he says.
Writing and editing come somewhat easy to Zurn; he credits that to his experience with The Snapper as a Millersville student.
“I joined The Snapper on day one,” he says. “It was a huge investment of my time over the years. I wrote all the time for the paper – columns and news reports – and did research and interviews. I really enjoyed meeting people. I also did the website for a year or two and learned a lot doing that.”
As a technology education teacher, Zurn works to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation. “Technology is so different than it was when I started,” he says. “Many of the things I’ve learned didn’t exist years ago. I have to constantly learn new things to stay current and modern. So much of what I did at Millersville as a tech ed major prepared me for this.”
It’s his 16-year-old son who keeps him “a bit modern or hip” when it comes to the lingo the students he teaches use now. “When he goes to college,” Zurn says, “I’ll be in trouble.”
Listen to Adam Zurn’s interview on WITF’s The Spark:
