Phat Gus, the self-appointed mastermind of a four-squirrel crew, led her team through nine obstacle stations — including a casino, a laser maze, underground tunnels, a moving-stone wall, and a combination-locked vault — to crack open Fort Knuts, described by Mark Rober as the most secure walnut storage facility in the western United States.
Meet the Crew: Phat Gus, Rick, Marty, and Frank
Mark Rober documented each member of the crew with a distinct operational role. Phat Gus served as the operation’s lead strategist — the equivalent of the mastermind in a classic heist film. Rober originally named her ‘Fat Gus’ the previous year because she was a notably large squirrel with an enthusiasm for food. He later discovered she was female and had been pregnant at the time, prompting a revision to ‘Phat Gus,’ a name she apparently approved without hesitation.
Rick was designated the crew’s acrobat — brave, agile, and suited for any task requiring physical dexterity. Rick delivered one of the operation’s most memorable moments when, after losing his footing on the spinning bar obstacle, he executed what Rober called a legendary leap, using his body as a natural parachute. Squirrels, Rober noted, are among the rare mammals capable of surviving falls from any height by flattening their bodies to increase air resistance — an evolutionary adaptation refined over more than 30 million years.
Marty was identified as the crew’s hacker, tasked with interacting with computer systems inside the heist course. Intelligent but easily startled, Marty repeatedly misread the maze’s directional layout, requiring Frank to physically enter the tunnels and guide him toward the correct path. Marty was also caught fleeing from the moving-stone wall even during segments when the wall was not actively functioning — reacting to the mere memory of its movement.
Frank served as the logistics expert, memorizing and mapping the entire nine-part course before briefing the rest of the team. When Frank reached the ventilation maze, he completed it on his first attempt with confident, uninterrupted movement — a direct result of his preparation.
The Nine-Station Assault on Fort Knuts
The course began at a single climbable pole — the only authorized entry point, with all other poles fitted with anti-climb deterrents. From there, Rick, Marty, Frank, and Phat Gus each confronted the casino station, a spinning-bar obstacle, a helicopter-blade mechanism triggered by added weight, a moving-stone climbing wall, a shelter with a trap-door elevator leading to underground tunnels, a control room requiring a typed password to deploy a ladder, a ventilation shaft maze with one-way emergency exits in every room, and finally the laser maze — which required the precision Rober compared to Catherine Zeta-Jones’s famous scene in the film ‘Entrapment.’
At the laser maze, Rick attempted to bypass the wires by climbing over the central pipe — and failed. Frank, having watched Rick’s failure, approached cautiously before successfully threading through on a second attempt. Phat Gus, operating with the composure expected of a lead strategist, became the first crew member to clear the laser maze and reach Fort Knuts. She was not distracted by a single walnut placed as bait — it took two walnuts to hold her attention long enough for Marty to operate the vault handle.
Once Marty turned the mechanism and the vault opened, a cargo net released, granting the crew full access to their prize. Rather than departing immediately, most of the squirrels cycled through the entire course repeatedly. Rick, Rober reported, displayed visible signs of stress even after the system was fully powered down.
The squirrels’ ability to orient mid-fall — rotating their heads downward in under 300 milliseconds and using conservation of angular momentum to land on their feet — represents one of biology’s most durable survival mechanisms. The squirrel lineage has existed for over 30 million years, and this physical adaptation has remained largely unchanged throughout that span, making Rick’s repeated plunges off the course less a liability than a demonstration of deep evolutionary engineering.
In the end, Rick buried every spare walnut he collected across the backyard, Marty and Frank repaired their briefly strained friendship, and Phat Gus spent her victory laps at the bird feeder — which, as Rober noted, was the target the entire operation had been designed to protect.
