Falls Church Woman Wins International Treasure Hunt

For more than a week, Kristina Beall, 27, of Falls Church, traveled halfway around the world in search of a case of Canadian Club whisky. She didn’t find the case of whisky hidden in the murky water of the volcanic lake on Niuafo’ou Island in Tonga, but she arrived at the location where it was hidden.

For her efforts in the Canadian Club Hide a Case challenge, she has brought home the $100,000 grand prize.

“This is probably the craziest thing I have ever done,” Beall said Wednesday during a telephone interview. “I’ve done a lot of traveling but nothing like this.”

More than 20,000 people competed for a chance to search for one of the cases of whisky hidden by Canadian Club. Contestants competed in online games to win a spot on one of the American or Canadian teams that would set out on a long travel to find the whisky. Of the eight people on the two four-man teams, Beall was the only woman.

Beall, a J.E.B. Stuart graduate, said a lot of her former classmates she keeps in touch with on Facebook cheered her via the popular social network. She said her friends were excited that she was competing in the international treasure hunt. Beall said she would compete in another treasure hunt if she could and now she knows what to expect.

“It was a really fast paced thing,” she said. “All of us were jetlagged and sleep deprived.”