BRIDGEWATER TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- High school students in Susquehanna County answered the challenge of a TV star and succeeded. He tweeted that a weather balloon from the TV show "MythBusters Jr." went down and wanted someone to find it.
"It started pouring, and we were determined at that point, so we hiked up this mountain. We crawled, at one point, on all fours."
Students at Montrose Area High School were looking for something specific -- a weather balloon launched by a "MythBusters Jr." cast member, 13-year-old Elijah Horland.
"I just saw this little piece of red material that could have been a leaf for all I knew, and at that point, I just started screaming that I found it," said senior Michayla Stahl.
"MythBusters Jr." is a show on The Science Channel. One of its stars posted on Twitter last week that his weather balloon went down somewhere in the woods in the Susquehanna County area.
He gave the GPS coordinates, and Montrose Area High School teacher Anthony McKennas and his science class took on the challenge.
"If we did find it, I was expecting it to be 30 feet up in a tree that we can't get and find a way to get it down somehow," said senior Maverick Beeman.
McKennas and his science class were already going on a field trip that day last week to the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour, and they decided to make a quick detour first.
"All of us were kind of skeptical on if we were actually going to go out and do this, but he was really set on doing it, so we were like, 'OK, let's go out and do it.'"
And out they went, the class of mostly seniors about to graduate played along with their science teacher.
"We actually programmed it into a GPS that one of the other teachers has for geocaching and got a general location that was pretty close," McKennas said.
McKennas teaches environmental science at the high school, so he thought this was actually a valuable lesson for his students.
"It's a lot of forestry stuff, wildlife, aquatics, things like that. Being out in the mountains tied right into what the curriculum was," McKennas said.
Michayla added that since she's the one who found the weather balloon, she shouldn't have to take her final exam.