Ring My Bell (or: First-to-Find)

Like all hobbies, geocaching has its own unique goals (see Challenges), perhaps more so than others due to its numbers-driven quality.  And Seattle probably has more unique goals than other places, just because there are so many geocaches here.  Seattle's most prized goal is to find the Seattle FTF Bell, which I managed to do last week along with a couple of other people.

Fast like a turtle

First-to-Find

The concept of being first to find is fairly self-explanatory:  someone hides a cache, and you are the first person to find it (or one of the people in a group that finds it first).  For my first few months of caching, I wasn't particularly interested in this pursuit, but I got my first chance in late August when we were vacationing in the Methow Valley (where of course, the competition is much less than in Seattle, if only because there are fewer people around).  Someone hid a cache a few miles from where we were staying on the day we arrived, and I just happened to notice it in the afternoon.  I piled the kids in the car to go look, confident I'd find it, but other than an amusing incident with a pig that followed our car down the road, there was no joy on that hunt.  The next morning, the cache was still unfound, and the hiding spot was next to a parking lot where my wife had to be dropped off for a trail run (The Cutthroat Classic, run on one of the most scenic stretches of the Pacific Crest Trail, by the way.  We're both doing it next year), so I looked some more.  And failed again.  Later in the day I took the kids to the same spot (where we had to meet my wife after the run), and failed a 3rd time.  I still haven't found that cache, but a number of other people have.

Ironically, the next day I could have easily gotten a FTF in the even more sparsely populated town of Conconully, Washington, when I bicycled into town to stay a few days.  But I didn't check the website for new caches in Conconully, and I had no internet access there, so someone from Leavenworth drove all the way there and found the cache first.

To really play the FTF game, though, you don't want to count on hitting the website at just the right time:  you want automatic notifications when the caches are published.   This is a premium feature on geocaching.com, so you have to pay them money.  But if you have, the link to Set Up Notifications is on the right column of your Quick View page.  Conveniently, the default is to notify you of anything published within 10 miles of your home location (you did set up your home location, didn't you?).  Inconveniently, you have to set up a different notification for each type of cache.  Luckily, there are only about half a dozen of them that are at all common (Multicache:  okay.  GPS Adventures Exhibit:  uh, what?).

It started out as just a bell...

The Seattle FTF Bell

Now-retired cacher fishiam gives a good summary of the Bell's history:

...it was not initially called the Seattle FTF bell, but rather the TUS FTF bell. What does TUS stand for you might ask? Tiresome Usual Suspects, a moniker (derisively) hung on a group of us back in 2005/2006 that were a largish (8-10) group of avid FTF'ers. We were fiercely competitive, going after all forms of new postings - from 1/1 traditionals to the toughest puzzles. Team Maccabee rather brilliantly created the bell as a way of both defusing and illuminating the competitive FTF scene in Seattle at the time.

[Note:  a '1/1 traditional' is a cache with the easiest possible difficulty rating and no puzzle required to solve it whatsoever.]

Team Maccabee (the original and still-active owner of the Bell) just found an old bell, added a special tag to it so that it was a trackable item, and hid it in a not very difficult cache.  As the years went by, the Bell was found and hidden by others, sometimes in fairly standard caches, but often in ridiculous locations (Kellogg Island) or with ridiculously difficult puzzles to solve (or multiple puzzles.  Note that the FTF for this cache drove from Mt. Vernon to Seattle to claim the prize).

As the years went by, the Bell was also renamed to the Seattle FTF Bell, and acquired an increasingly large collection of other objects attached to it (see the picture below) so that it is now too large and too valuable to actually leave in a cache.  If you are the FTF of a Bell cache, you have to contact the cache owner to acquire your prize.

...and now it's come to this.

Arcade

The first time I heard about the Bell was in 2011 when a friend tried to enlist me to help find a cache in Discovery Park.  I wasn't much help, and I still haven't figured that puzzle out, even with the hints that were added later.  But when a new cache called Arcade was published on Thursday around lunchtime, I thought I'd give it a chance.  After all, it was apparently near Lake Union, so it was fairly close by if I managed to solve the puzzles.

The puzzle in Arcade was to win 3 video games online, Pac-man, Solitaire, and Minesweeper.  Each one gave you a cache clue after you beat it.  I started with Minesweeper, since I figured that would be a good gauge of how hard the games would be -- you can program the game to be just about as hard as you want by increasing the number of mines to find.  As you know if you've played Minesweeper, the game involves a lot of logic and, assuming more than a few mines, a bit of luck.  By using a few basic strategies (basically, make your 50-50 guesses at the beginning of the game) I was able to clear this one after about a dozen tries and about 5 minutes of work.  It yielded a combination.

Next I tried Solitaire, which was just the standard game of Klondike.  Like Minesweeper, there are a few strategies you can use to increase your odds of winning, but since this was just a speed game, I abandoned games early unless they appeared promising and again beat the game in about 5 minutes, which yielded the longitude coordinates.

Finally I turned to Pac-Man, a game I'm not very good at.  Fortunately for me, this was a strange version that (at least on my browser) featured no maze, just an array of dots, and only one ghost.  To make things easier, all it took was one deke and the ghost wandered off the edge of my window and never returned.  Trying the game later on other browsers, it appears no one ever gets a maze or more than one ghost, but the ghost does sometimes play a little smarter.  Still, it's easy to fool if you just draw it off-screen.  It seems that you can return from off-screen, but the ghost never does.  In any event, with no ghost, it was just a matter of gobbling up the dots to get the latitude coordinates.  Together the coordinates yielded a street corner just a couple of miles away, so I set out to see what I could find.

At Ground Zero I saw two women (the bad news).  But they were clearly still searching (the good news).  They told me they had been looking for 20 minutes without any luck.  I joined them in not finding the cache.  A few minutes later, another gentleman, markta showed up, and together we all 4 failed to find anything except one suggestive piece of wood.  I stripped the bark off the wood looking for a special way to open it, but could not.  After about 10 minutes, the women gave up and left.  A few minutes later, markta, after learning I had never had a FTF, yielded the search to me, as he had already had many of his own, including finding the Bell about 5 years ago when it was still young.

A few minutes after he left, I was getting increasingly discouraged, when who should show up but methylgrace, a cacher I'd met virtually but not in person.  She hadn't beat the games either, but was instead directed here by Atomhugger, who had, but was too busy to find it himself.  After showing her where I thought the coordinates pointed, she just reached out and grabbed it from its hiding place.  D'oh!  I could have sworn I just searched there.

Luckily, she was gracious enough to credit all of us with a 3-way FTF.  The cache was contained in a lockbox like real estate agents use (hence the combination), which was, of course, not large enough for the Bell.  We picked it up from the cache owner about 15 minutes later.

Our job now is to concoct a devilish enough puzzle and/or hide for the next cache.  Also to add something to the Bell to make it even more unwieldy.  The picture above was taken in our secret underground cache construction lair.  Okay, it was at a local coffee shop.

P.S. I've gotten 2 more FTFs since finding the Bell.

Ride bikes!  Donate food!  Dress up like Miles Standish!

Upcoming and ongoing

 

• WIOL/Winter O #2 - November 17, Magnuson Park.  Remember if it rains that Magnuson used to be a swamp.  You've been warned.
• Southcenter Mall Scavenger Hunt - November 17.  You could win an ornament!  Should I mention that the only time I went to this mall, I escaped being caught in a lockdown by about 90 minutes?  Yeah, I think I should.
• Cranksgiving 2012 - November 17, Gas Works Park.  Ride down to Columbia City, collecting food for charity along the way.  It's like your own personal food drive on wheels.  I'd do it were it not for prior commitments.  See above.  No, above the mall scavenger hunt.
• Fall BEAST Race - November 18, Maple Valley. The 'E' in BEAST stands for Evening, but thankfully, this race is during the day.  Some running, some biking, some orienteering, a surprise challenge.  And if it's on the Eastside, there's usually snow involved, somehow.  Not on purpose, but it just seems to happen.  Seems unlikely given the weather forecast, but still...
• Puzzlewright Puzzle Games - November 18, 2pm, Northgate Barnes and Noble.  'Tis the season...for contests in malls, I guess.  This one seems a little more palatable, though:  a puzzle contest put on by a puzzle book press.  Your prize if you win:  a book of puzzles.  Go if you like puzzles.
• Holiday Goose Chase - starts around Thanksgiving, I presume.  A scavenger hunt of sorts in downtown Seattle.  Requires downloading a mobile app.  Put on by geoteaming, a local company that puts on geocaching-themed events.
• WIOL/Winter O #3 - December 1, Bridle Trails State Park.  It's in a state park, so it's a little more rustic.  Oh, wait, it's in Kirkland.  
• Puzzled Pint - December 11, ???.  Meet at a local pub to do puzzles on teams.  Which pub?  Well, there's a puzzle you have to solve to find out, released the previous day (if you can't figure out what day that is, you probably shouldn't come).  Repeats every 2nd Tuesday of the months at different locations.
• WIOL/Winter O #4 - December 15, UW Campus.  There is only one time you can hold a meet on the UW campus:  between quarters.  I like this venue if only because I can occasionally beat the top orienteers (on a single checkpoint only) because I know the place pretty well.

Photo Credits

Geocaching log: eszter via photopin cc
Gracie (the dog): schulesjoe

Upcoming and Ongoing

I spent a lot of time on the American History Puzzle last week, and didn't have time to include upcoming local events in my wrap-up post.  Since there are a few good ones coming up, I figured I'd just give you a quick update:  The last First Thursday Run of the year!  Scavenger hunts at the UW and Downtown Seattle!  A colloquim on winning contests!  The start of winter orienteering!  Get out there and have some fun!

P.S., these are all in the Seattle area.

Possible Golden Ticket hiding place

(italics = new since last time)

• First Thursday Adventure Run - November 1, Green Lake.  Last one before March.  Remember:  if it's raining, they still give away the same prizes, so your chances of winning skyrocket.
• Golden Ticket Scavenger Hunt - November 2, UW campus, 10am-2pm.  Part of W Day, the UW's birthday celebration.  Clues are tweeted at the top of the hour.  First to find each ticket gets a hoodie and a box of chocolates.  I just might compete in this.
• WIOL/Winter O #1 - November 3, Lincoln Park.  Competitive orienteering for young and old.
• The Theory of Crowdsourcing Contests - November 15, UW Campus, 3:30pm.  It's not every day that there's a scholarly talk on contests.  Unfortunately, this is not about puzzle hunts, but contests where the entrants compete to complete a task, such as design a logo.  Still, there's nothing wrong about learning about strategies for winning contests.
• WIOL/Winter O #2 - November 17, Magnuson Park.  Remember if it rains that Magnuson used to be a swamp.  You've been warned.
• Fall BEAST Race - November 18. The 'E' in BEAST stands for Evening, but thankfully, this race is during the day.  Some running, some biking, some orienteering, a surprise challenge.  And if it's on the Eastside, there's usually snow involved, somehow.  Not on purpose, but it just seems to happen.
• Holiday Goose Chase - starts around Thanksgiving, I presume.  A scavenger hunt of sorts in downtown Seattle.  Requires downloading a mobile app.  Put on by geoteaming, a local company that puts on geocaching-themed events.

Photo Credits

Broken Obelisk: Elephant wearing striped pants via photopin cc

The end of the contest

[Edit:  I had the wrong answer to #11.  Thanks to Diana Yost and Christopher Denault for giving me the right answer.]

[Update 10/25:  According to Ken Jennings's blog post, only 17 people had solved puzzle #8 by last Friday, which might have led you to think only a few people were competing in the contest.  But as of now, this blog post has over 550 reads.  While these 2 numbers are obviously imperfect indicators, I would take this to mean that if you managed to come close to solving all 11 puzzles by Monday, you were in fairly elite company.  So give yourself a hand.]

I've spent the last 5 days obsessing about the Great American History Puzzle, which just ended Monday.  I was at first not very optimistic that I would win.  Then for a while there it looked very likely.  And then, not so much.  Finally, it came down to forces mostly beyond my control, and I didn't have the right answer, anyway.  If nothing else, I had the right idea pretty early.  Here's how it went down.

Note:  if you want to solve the puzzles on your own, better stop reading now, as I give away a number of the answers (not to puzzle #11; but if you read the comments you'll probably figure it out).

As things stood, noon on Friday (Pacific Time)

Friday

The contest was structured with different puzzles being released throughout the month of October.  After the initial puzzle, which got you a password to the website, there were 9 puzzles, the next-to-last of which was released last Friday, October 19.  The 9 puzzles each had as an answer a 'treasure' from the Smithsonian Museum, e.g., "Morse telegraph".  As you solved a puzzle, the grid would be filled in with a piece of the final puzzle (number 11), which it became clear early on was an acrostic.

Puzzle #9 (the middle bottom) wasn't very hard, and I solved it in about half an hour, leaving the grid pretty much as it is above (not quite, as at the time the final puzzle square in the bottom right was grayed out).  I didn't know if the acrostic was solveable or if it was even the real puzzle #11.  But I printed out a screenshot and took it to lunch.

I'd solved a few of the clues already (A, D, N, O, S).  I guessed F might be 'Wrought' (from 'What hath God wrought', the first message sent by telegraph), T might be 'Swine Flu Victim', and G might be 'Garde Meuble' (where a precursor of one of the treasures, the Hope Diamond, used to be kept).  A couple of these guesses turned out to be wrong, but I had a sufficient number of correct answers and could make some good guesses to start getting a few more clues, such as B, C and Q.  Soon I realized the answer to G was 'Fort McHenry', which was a huge breakthrough, as the only thing that might have been in Fort McHenry that was now in the Smithsonian was The Star-Spangled Banner flag (also known as the Great Garrison Flag).  But we hadn't had that as an answer yet, so that meant it had to be the answer to puzzle #10 in the bottom right.  If I was right, that meant that once puzzle 10 came out I could instantly solve it and finish the contest, assuming I could solve this acrostic.

Eventually the whole acrostic fell into place, even though a number of clues are not even on the portion shown (G-M and V-Z).  When finished, the acrostic reads:

Years ago James Smithson's legacy founded an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.  Borrow two letters from each of all your nine treasures.  Increase and diffuse those letters to obtain your final answer taken from a great American poet.

In most acrostics, the initial letters of the clued words spell out the author and title of the work that's being quoted.  In this puzzle, the initial letters of the clue words spell out:  "Borrow fourth and last letters."

Say, you could see it at Fort McHenry, and now at the Smithsonian

Puzzle #2

 So, if you take the 4th and last letters from the nine treasures, you get

hdztmsshmhnkctblsr

[This is assuming 'The Star-spangled banner' is the answer to puzzle #10.  I also considered 'Star-spangled banner', 'Great Garrison Flag' and 'The Great Garrison Flag', but the Smithsonian website on the museum exhibit calls it the Star-Spangled Banner, and most of the previous treasures have included the 'The', so I considered 'The Star-Spangled banner' to be the most likely variant.]

Anyway, the letters above are clearly nonsense, and I struggled with them for a while.  Do we turn the letters sideways to give vowels (something that was done in an earlier puzzle)?  For example:  H sideways = I.  M sideways = E.  And what does 'increase and diffuse' mean?  I gathered diffuse meant to anagram, but are we supposed to make extra copies of some of the letters?  Or maybe just add in the vowels?

Finally, it came to me:  shift each letter one position in the alphabet.  So H turns into I, D into E, etc.  Now we have plenty of vowels, and a reasonable mix of consonants:

ieaunttiniolducmts

Unfortunately, these letters are too easy to anagram.  The Internet Anagram server said it found over 80,000 anagrams, and it doesn't usually use proper names.  I easily found some very suggestive words:  'document', 'institution', 'education', 'music' (under the assumption the 'Great American Poet' might be someone like Bob Dylan), 'costume', 'statue'.  Using the advanced options on the Anagram server, I tried requiring the server to use those words and seeing what it could make of the remaining letters.  But nothing looked good enough for a final answer.

Next, I investigated the Great American Poet angle, thinking the answer might be something like "Emily Dickinson's teakettle".  Unfortunately, the only poet that seemed to qualify and that I could get out of the given letters was T.S. Eliot, and I couldn't make anything out of the remaining letters, and couldn't find anything the museum had on display from T.S. Eliot.  I went to bed Friday night to sleep on it.

Animated gifs:  slightly more annoying than the <blink> tag

More anagramming, and my (incorrect) solution

The next morning, I thought the answer might be a poem written for the Smithsonian, maybe with the word Institution in the title.  I could find no such poem.  I noticed 'castle' was also in the letters, so I tried that to no avail.  I asked the Internet Anagram Server for all of its 80,000 anagrams, and was discouraged when I found they all began with the word 'A', even though you can ask it to find anagrams with no 1-letter words and it will still find tens of thousands.  This is when I started to sour on the Internet Anagram server.

Finally, I turned to a friend for a fresh look.  I knew he'd been working on and off on the contest, but probably hadn't been trying as hard.  He didn't have any ideas, and then he did, writing me a few hours later saying he noticed you could get 'at si edu' from the letters.  So maybe the answer was an e-mail address.  I didn't see how that would work logistically, but I did manage to anagram the remaining letters to 'columnist in'.  

My next thought was maybe it was a web address:  something-something.xyz.si.edu  Go to the URL, find the answer.  Again, I couldn't make much of this, but working with 'columnist' some more, I noticed you could make the word 'ultimatum' out of the letters if you didn't use 'at' for an e-mail address.  Oh, no you can't (not enough m's).  But wait, you can make 'ultimate', which is a synonym for 'final'.  Hmmm.  After mucking about with the remaining letters, I noticed they anagram nicely to 'ultimate inductions', a synonym for 'final answer'.  This, I decided, was the correct answer.   [Note:  I was wrong.  There is an answer that actually comes from a legitimate Great American Poet.]

The big hitch

 

Unfortunately, it was now only 1pm on Saturday, and I realized after my initial moment of triumph that even if I was way ahead of other solvers (debatable), there was still plenty of time for other people to solve it.  And, judging from the Twitter feed, plenty of people eventually did.  Which set us up for what was, in my opinion, a terrible ending.  The contest rules said the winner was the first person to send all their answers to an undisclosed e-mail address (which would be revealed to you after you solved all the puzzles).  But because solving the acrostic gave you a solution for the last 2 puzzles, this meant the right strategy was to pre-write the e-mail, wait for the final puzzle to be revealed, then type in your answers (to get the e-mail address) and send off the e-mail as quickly as possible.  In other words, the fastest typist with the best Internet path to the Smithsonian would win.

A couple of us wrote to Ken Jennings on his Facebook wall and in the puzzle's blog, asking them to consider a liberal interpretation of the tiebreaker rule:  in the event of a tie, the contestants would get another puzzle to determine the winner.  We suggested they consider any correct entries that came within the first few minutes after the final puzzle was released to be a 'tie'.  But apparently they did not listen to us.  At 11am Monday morning, I madly refreshed the puzzle page until the puzzle opened, pasted 'The Star-Spangled Banner' in the answer space (already had it in my clipboard, of course), got the e-mail address, and sent off the e-mail.  My e-mail timestamp says 11:00:34, but that's just a local clock somewhere, and what really matters is when it arrived at the Smithsonian.   I had the wrong answer, but other people who did it in roughly the same time with the right answer didn't win either.   Guess we'll be paying for our trip to Washington D.C. out of our own pockets.

Can we fix it?  Yes we can!

Fixes

 

All in all, the contest was challenging and well-run, but the ending was unsatisfactory.  The contest administrators underestimated their audience, which is a common mistake.  At some point, they had to have convinced themselves that the final puzzle was too hard to be done with only incomplete information, but that's just the sort of obstacle that a large group of people will overcome.

In addition, the final e-mail address should have been a completely new e-mail address (they re-used the help e-mail address, and I can't help thinking the winner skipped putting in the answer to #10 step and just e-mailed their answers as soon as the puzzle was revealed).  But this turns out to be a minor point if people cannot fully pre-solve the final puzzles.

[One more bug, while I'm nitpicking:  a number of people report that they put in the wrong answer to puzzle #10 and got the e-mail address and the link to the full acrostic anyway.  That just should not have happened.]

For this contest, I believe there was an easy fix to the main problem:  switch puzzle #10 and #8.  Puzzle #10 could be easily pre-solved by solving the acrostic, because clue G gives away the answer.   But puzzle #8 is not referenced in the revealed clues.  It is referenced in the final puzzle:  "Middle name of a president two after the owner of one of your treasures."  Answer:  Ulysses.  But in the absence of the clue, it's hard to see how you could go from 'Ulysses' to the answer to #8:  "Lincoln's stovepipe hat."  So #8 would be extremely difficult to pre-solve.  In addition, both #8 and #10 are visually-oriented puzzles where you have to examine pictures closely, so the challenge would be roughly the same.

Also, if you can't solve #8, you're missing 2 letters in the anagramming step, which makes finding the solution to #11 much more difficult.

Note, however, that clever and determined people could still pre-solve the acrostic portion of the final puzzle, and be in a better position to finish the contest.  But they would still have to answer #8 and the anagramming after that, and the contest would come down to puzzle-solving, not quick typing and a blessed ISP.

Photo Credits

 

Wrenches: shimgray via photopin cc

Puzzles, Puzzles Everywhere

Your tormentor, Ken Jennings

And yet one more...

The puzzles just keep on coming this month (see my two previous posts).  In addition to the local events, I just learned about a national puzzle contest with a local angle.  The Great American History Puzzle, sponsored by the Smithsonian, has 11 puzzles constructed by local trivia/map/puzzle expert Ken Jennings.  In case you're too lazy to read the Wikipedia article, Ken is the guy who one 74 games of Jeopardy! in a row, a feat that guaranteed he could spend the rest of his life writing books about maps and the like.

The top prize is a trip for 4 to Washington DC, including a backstage tour of the Smithsonian.  Sounds good to me.  If it sounds good to you, your first step is to pick up a copy of the magazine (about $6.50 at a newsstand) or an electronic facsimile.  Note:  I tried twice to get the free copy promised at the bottom of that webpage, and never got one.  I finally broke down and bought one today.  Once you have a copy, turn (physically or electronically) to page 39 and get started on the first puzzle.

Once you have solved the first puzzle, you will get a password that allows you to access the rest of the puzzles.  The next 9 puzzles have been slowly released throughout the month:  2-6 have already been released.  7-9 will be released next week, with #10 released on the 22nd.  Once you have solved all 10, you will be able to solve #11; the first person to submit all 11 correct answers (each puzzle has a simple, short answer) wins the grand prize.  Presumably this will occur on the 22nd.

So far, there have been some cryptography, a riddle, a crossword, and a wild card or two (origami!).  The 11th puzzle (which is slowly revealed as you solve the others) looks like an acrostic but that may be a red herring or, at the least, just the first step.

[Speaking of wild cards, go Cardinals!]

Want some hints?  Read Ken's blog about the puzzle.  Want even more hints?  Follow #historypuzzle on Twitter, which has, frankly, spoiled a few of the puzzles.  

A small section of a Corn Maze, orienteering style

Upcoming and Ongoing

(italics = new since last time)

 The Great American History Puzzle - See above.  It'll all be over on October 22.

Urbanquest - Pre-made scavenger hunts in various cities for about $30.  Ends with a (pre-made) reservation at a local restaurant (meal not included in the $30).

• The Hunt for Odin's Horse - October 13 and 14, online and Ballard, free.   You must register by October 7 to compete in the live event on the 14th.
• Sunset Hill Hood Hunt - October 13.  Just call it Ballard if you like.  Start at 10:15, end at 11:30, find checkpoints in a 1 square mile area.  Free, {but/because there are} no prizes and you have to print your own map.
• Hike and Seek - October 13, Seward Park.  Fundraiser for the National Wildlife Federation that combines a hike with a scavenger hunt (mostly for kids 10 and under).  Registration opens at 9am.
• Choose Your Corn Maze Adventure - October 14, Bob's Corn Maze, Snohomish.  Orienteering in a corn maze.  This should be interesting.  Starts early, before the maze opens to the general public, who would probably be confused by strangely-attired folks running through the maze.  I don't know, though, maybe next time they should just issue the orienteers Halloween costumes and have them scare the other folks.  Haunted Corn Maze!
• Art Dash for Ca$h - October 20.  12 hour (10am-10pm) Bike Scavenger Hunt for public art.  Teams of two or more required.  Cash prizes of some sort.  I am definitely intrigued.
• Emerald City Search 2012, Part II - October 21.  Surely you know the drill by now.  Find a medallion hidden in the city somewhere in plain sight, following cryptic clues (one per day).   Thousands of dollars in prizes.
• Messmann's Messquerade - October 27, 7pm, Belltown, $30/person.  Bike Scavenger Hunt, with costumed teams and a huge party afterwards.  A Halloween tradition, back after a year on hiatus.
• Choose Your Vampire Adventure - October 27, 6pm, Lynndale Park.  Orienteering with a twist.  A few orienteers are 'vampires' who can steal your punch card at any time.  And it's in the dark.  Spooky.
• First Thursday Adventure Run - November 1, Green Lake.  Last one before March.  Remember:  if it's raining, they still give away the same prizes, so your chances of winning skyrocket.
• WIOL/Winter O #1 - November 3, Lincoln Park.  See above.  Competitive orienteering for young and old.

Photo Credits

Ken Jennings:  Officer Phil via photopin cc
Corn Maze: Cascade Orienteering Club

Winter is Coming

Global warming has made White Walkers less frightening than they used to be

After weeks of dry, sunny weather, the extended forecast finally shows Showers on the 9th day from today. Sketchy predictions aside, winter cannot be avoided, and the puzzle hunter must be prepared.

My confidential informant tells me the medallion is around here somewhere

But first...

Somehow last week I forgot another October puzzle hunt:  the 2nd Emerald City Search of 2012, which starts on October 21, 50 years after the end of the Seattle World's Fair of 1962.  [Speaking of weather, Century 21 had pretty good weather its whole run, except for one notable day, Columbus Day, 1962, when the worst recorded windstorm in the Pacific Northwest blew into town...]

I won the first 2012 ECS back in April, so I'll probably lay low for this one.  Well, maybe I'll bug some friends to go get it if I have a good idea or two.  In other words, I'll send some friends on wild goose chases.

Last chance to enter (in 2012)

What's out

The First Thursday runs take a break over the winter; November is the last one of 2012, and they start up again in March 2013.  Take advantage of your chance to win free stuff while you still can.   Be sure to bring a light or reflective vest until the sunset once again is after 7pm (May?  June?).

If you're a geocacher (or hiker or biker), be aware that the Snoqualmie Tunnel closes from November to May due to the hazardous icicles that form on the ceiling.  The Tunnel is the home to one of the most popular caches in the state, Bloody Fingers, Dirty Diapers, as well as the easiest access to two other popular caches just past the west end of the tunnel (Mission 9: Tunnel of Light Reclaimed and Iron Horse).  These two can be accessed by taking the Iron Horse Trail from the west, but that's much more of a climb than the flat (but dark) walk through the tunnel.  I will try to get these caches at the end of the month on a trip to the Tri-Cities.

If you absolutely, positively have to go up in the mountains in the winter...

What's In

Of course, many lowland trails remain open year-round, such as walks near the Puget Sound shore or on the coast, or almost year-round, such as those around Cougar and Tiger Mountains.  And if geocaching is your thing, there is almost surely a cache on any trail you choose (in the case of Cougar/Tiger Mountains, hundreds of them).  If you're looking for advice where to hike, your best resource is the Washington Trails Association.  Their trail descriptions are often lifted straight from popular hiking books (with the author's permission, of course), and the Trip Reports will usually clue you in as to whether the trail is clear or snow-filled (and likewise for the road to the trailhead).  The website often has lists of good hikes to do right now, such as fall color hikes, easy-access winter hikes, or snowshoe/cross country skiing 'hikes', if that's your thing.

Special orienteering events continue, such as the Fall BEAST race and the Holiday Street Scramble in the Market.  But the real orienteering action is at the WIOL (Washington Interscholastic Orienteering League) meets and the public meets associated with them.  As you might have deduced, WIOL is for school-age kids, from kindergarten through high school.  Elementary and middle school competition is usually pretty relaxed, but things get a lot more competitive in the high school brackets.  If your child is interested in orienteering, it's a great place to start.  There are 2 meets per month, every month from November through February, and the courses generally start easy in an urban park and progress to trickier stuff in places like Lord Hill Park in Snohomish, culminating with a championship in February.

Even if you aren't in K-12, there are always associated public courses at every meet, and given the range in courses required for the kids, there will be something at your level.  Run the basic course the 3rd graders do, and work your way up to the toughest high school level courses.  In the process you get to visit a number of interesting parks around the Puget Sound, from Olympia to Monroe and Whidbey Island.  There's always someone around to teach you the finer points of the sport, and if you have a kid competing in WIOL, you can join the mailing list, where they often give free tips on the finer points of orienteering like aiming off and catching features.

The first WIOL meet is November 3 at Lincoln Park in West Seattle.

Are you orienteerierer than a 12th grader?

Upcoming

(italics = new since last time)

• Lake Sammamish Orienteering - October 7, Lake Sammamish State Park.  No, you don't actually go running in the lake, silly.
• The Hunt for Odin's Horse - October 13 and 14, online and Ballard, free.   You must register by October 7 to compete in the live event on the 14th.
• Sunset Hill Hood Hunt - October 13.  Just call it Ballard if you like.  Start at 10:15, end at 11:30, find checkpoints in a 1 square mile area.  Free, {but/because there are} no prizes and you have to print your own map.
• Choose Your Corn Maze Adventure - October 14, Bob's Corn Maze, Snohomish.  Orienteering in a corn maze.  This should be interesting.  Starts early, before the maze opens to the general public, who would probably be confused by strangely-attired folks running through the maze.  I don't know, though, maybe next time they should just issue the orienteers Halloween costumes and have them scare the other folks.  Haunted Corn Maze!
• Art Dash for Ca$h - October 20.  12 hour (10am-10pm) Bike Scavenger Hunt for public art.  Teams of two or more required.  Cash prizes of some sort.  I am definitely intrigued.
• Emerald City Search 2012, Part II - October 21.  Surely you know the drill by now.  Find a medallion hidden in the city somewhere in plain sight, following cryptic clues (one per day).   Thousands of dollars in prizes.
• Messmann's Messquerade - October 27, 7pm, Belltown, $30/person.  Bike Scavenger Hunt, with costumed teams and a huge party afterwards.  A Halloween tradition, back after a year on hiatus.
• Choose Your Vampire Adventure - October 27, 6pm, Lynndale Park.  Orienteering with a twist.  A few orienteers are 'vampires' who can steal your punch card at any time.  And it's in the dark.  Spooky.
• First Thursday Adventure Run - November 1, Green Lake.  Last one before March.  Remember:  if it's raining, they still give away the same prizes, so your chances of winning skyrocket.
• WIOL/Winter O #1 - November 3, Lincoln Park.  See above.  Competitive orienteering for young and old.

Photo Credits

Snowmen:  vintagedept via photopin cc
Tunnel: Richard T. Moore
Snowshoers: AlexiUeltzen via photopin cc
WIOL: http://cascadeoc.org/wiol

October is the month for Puzzle Hunts

I don't know why, may be it's the persistence of the good summer weather, but October is shaping up to be a month of Puzzle Hunt Contests in Seattle.

Dude wants his horse back.

Hunt for Odin's Horse

First up is the Hunt for Odin's Horse, October 13th and 14th in Ballard, in conjunction with the premiere of Mirror Stage's play, Odin's Horse. It's billed as the 'first green puzzle hunt':  all clues are released and all solutions submitted via the Internet, and you're supposed to get there and get around via foot, public transit or (they don't mention it, but this is what I'm going to use) bike.  Lone Shark Games, a company that has done other local puzzle/scavenger hunts such as the Renton Duck Hunt, is in charge of the puzzles.  Apart from the 'green' aspect, the format is a little odd, in that the first day's clues (on the 13th) are optional and you don't even have to be there.  If you do solve them, they just get you bonus points on the 14th, when the real running around commences.

The prize if you finish is a seat at the Valhalla banquet the night of the 14th, featuring Odin beers (tasty!) and scenes from the play.  Top-scoring teams will get other, unspecified prizes (here are a couple of guesses:  Odin beer.  Tickets to the play).  Still, they had me at free banquet.

One important point:  to play on the 14th, you must register by October 7th at the website.  That's next week.  Teams of 3-4 are recommended, and a smartphone is required.  I'm putting my team together as I write.

Bike to Kent for more points

Art Dash 4 Ca$h

The next weekend is the Art Dash 4 Ca$h, in conjunction with the City Arts Fest.  Once again, the arts community comes through with a puzzle hunt.  This one combines two of my favorite pastimes:  Puzzle Hunts and biking.  Details are sparse, but it seems like you'll be biking around King County, taking your picture at various pieces of public art.  But they also promise various bike-related shenanigans like short races and footdown competitions (basically:  everyone is on a bike in a circle, last one to put a foot down wins.  Anything goes, but keep in mind that if you hit someone, you're probably going to fall down as well).  

Minimum team size is 2.  Note that if you're supposed to stick together on a bike race, the smaller your team is, the better (unless you're Lance Armstrong or something, in which case, stop slumming).  On the other hand, if you can split up, larger teams have the advantage.  I'll need to know the exact rules before I know whether to add more people to my team but for now, I'm sticking with two or three.  Hours of the hunt are 10am-10pm, so bring plenty of energy bars.

Costumes and bikes.  Two great tastes that go great together.

Messmann's Messquerade

After a year off, the legendary Halloween bike/costume/scavenger hunt race Messmanns Messquerade is back on October 27.  Messman put on this race/event/party for 10 years straight, then skipped last year.  As I hear it, a group of friends thought it was too good an idea to let it die, so they brought it back.  Requirements:  team size of at least 2, costumes.  This being an actual scavenger hunt, the more people you have, the more stuff you can find, so the only reason to keep your team small is because you can't scrounge up enough costumes.

Hey, it's Halloween!  For costume ideas, try searching for Messquerade on Google, or let me do it for you.  It's an election year, so might I suggest "Rejected Republican Presidential Candidates."  Scary.

Hunting by the light of the moon

Upcoming

(italics = new since last time)

• Three15er Rogaine - September 29-30, Naches. 4 hours, 9 hours, or 24 hours in the forests of the Cascades.  Note that the 24-hour race is the actual, honest to goodness North American Rogaining Championships.  Probably won't show up on Wide World of Sports, though.
• Puzzle Hunt 2012 - September 29, online or (I suppose) San Jose.   I'm a little late on the notification here, but you can register for this charity puzzle hunt and play online.  Or you could fly down to San Jose, if you're that kind of crazy.
• First Thursday Adventure Run - October 4, Green Lake.  Last time, I actually won something!  But the $1 beers would probably keep me coming anyway.
• Lake Sammamish Orienteering - October 7, Lake Sammamish State Park.  No, you don't actually go running in the lake, silly.
• The Hunt for Odin's Horse - October 13 and 14, online and Ballard, free.  See above.   You must register by October 7 to compete in the live event on the 14th.
• Sunset Hill Hood Hunt - October 13.  Just call it Ballard if you like.  Start at 10:15, end at 11:30, find checkpoints in a 1 square mile area.  Free, {but/because there are} no prizes and you have to print your own map.
• Choose Your Corn Maze Adventure - October 14, Bob's Corn Maze, Snohomish.  Orienteering in a corn maze.  This should be interesting.  Starts early, before the maze opens to the general public, who would probably be confused by strangely-attired folks running through the maze.  I don't know, though, maybe next time they should just issue the orienteers Halloween costumes and have them scare the other folks.  Haunted Corn Maze!
• Art Dash for Ca$h - October 20.  12 hour (10am-10pm) Bike Scavenger Hunt for public art.  Teams of two or more required.  Cash prizes of some sort.  I am definitely intrigued.
• Messmann's Messquerade - October 27, 7pm, Belltown, $30/person.  Bike Scavenger Hunt, with costumed teams and a huge party afterwards.  A Halloween tradition, back after a year on hiatus.
• Choose Your Vampire Adventure - October 27, 6pm, Lynndale Park.  Orienteering with a twist.  A few orienteers are 'vampires' who can steal your punch card at any time.  And it's in the dark.  Spooky.

Photo Credits

Odin: spratmackrel via photopin cc
Earthworks: Hollingsworth via photopin cc
Messquerade team: xaqe via photopin cc
Moon: Sky Noir via photopin cc

Challenging

So proud of my baby

But first a word from our sponsor...

This Sunday, September 23, is the Fremont Oktoberfest Street Scramble, with a course I designed.  It's the fourth Fremont Street Scramble I've designed, and, like the past two, it has a theme related to a famous Fremont landmark.  30+ checkpoints, from SPU up to the Zoo; find as many as you can in 90 minutes, on foot only.  Starts at 10:30am at Solstice Plaza, but you'll want to be there earlier to check-in or register and plan your route.  And afterward, of course, you can enjoy Oktoberfest.

Oh wait, that's the expurgated version.

The Executive Version

I used geocaching.com for a number of months before I signed up for a Premium Membership.  What changed my mind?  I had started training for a half marathon, and I don't really enjoy running all that much. [So why run?  I find it helps keep my legs in shape for other pursuits I enjoy much more, like ultimate frisbee.]

Anyhoo, training for a half marathon involves lots of runs of 3-5 miles (plus some longer ones), which I used to find tedious.  I don't like when people wear their iPods while running, but I certainly understand it, as running is usually as dull as toast (plus the tunes can help keep your mind off how tired you are or how your shoes seem too tight or whatever).  But that all changed when I decided to add a geocache or two to each run.  Jog a mile and a half to Green Lake, find a cache, jog back.  I found this much more enjoyable than my old routine, and it also caused me to vary the routes of my runs.  (And in case you're wondering, the official word is that it's not the speed that counts for most of these runs, just the fact that you covered the miles, so a 5 or 10 minute break in the middle to find a cache doesn't matter).  I decided this upgrade in my running routine was worth rewarding geocaching.com with $30 of my money.

The first thing I noticed (besides a fancier version of the map of nearby caches) was the number of  'premium member-only caches' that I now had access to.  Which was a good thing, since the number of normal caches jogging distance from my house was getting pretty small, and many of the remaining ones I'd already tried and failed to find at least once.  In addition, Premium Membership brought with it a page of new statistics, such as:  "You found the most caches in August, and usually on Wednesday." [Really, Wednesday?  I don't know why.]  But this week I discovered something else...

Are you asking for a challenge?

Challenge Caches

I actually discovered my first 'official' challenge cache soon after I started caching, as the Puzzler's Puzzle Challenge is near my house.  Puzzler's Puzzle, like all challenges, is a regular geocache (so, a container hidden somewhere in a public place that you have to find).  Like all puzzle caches, there is a puzzle you have to complete to discover the true coordinates --- all caches have published coordinates, but for puzzle caches these coordinates are bogus.  What makes Puzzler's Puzzle a challenge cache is that, in addition to finding the cache, you have to complete another task involving other caches before you can legitimately count it as a find.  In the case of Puzzler's Puzzle, for each year from 2001 to the present, you have to find a puzzle cache hidden in that year. (Geocaching started in 2000, but there are apparently no puzzle caches left from that year.  Btw, after recently finding Minimalism on Queen Anne Hill, I only need to find one from 2001 to qualify).

Puzzler's Puzzle is rare in that it is a challenge cache that is not a Premium Member-only cache.  Most challenges are Premium Member-only partly because they're meant for people who geocache more than casually, but also because of all the other perks that Premium Members get that make Challenge caches easier to administer and check.  For example, many of the challenges involve those extra statistics I mentioned before:  Find a cache every day for a month (or year).  Find every possible combination of Difficulty/Terrain ratings.  Etc.

Another feature Premium Members get is the ability to save lists of caches (called Bookmarks) on the site.  This makes checking easier for the cache owners for certain types of Challenges.  For example, there are challenges based on the titles of caches, e.g., Find 10 caches with colors in their title.  Instead of typing in the names of the caches when you find the challenge cache, you can create a bookmark list for the cache owner to check.

This brings up one of the main drawbacks I've found with the geocaching.com interface:  there is no easy way to search cache titles near a certain location.  So, for example, for the colors challenge, I have found caches with Red, Blue, Green, White and Gray, and have a line on Silver, but I'd like to look for nearby caches with Yellow or Black or Orange in the title, and I see no way to do so (you can look for nearby caches, and you can look for the words, but not the intersection of the two.  Please tell me if I'm wrong, because I'd love to know how to do this).  The best way to find these caches is (surprise), Bookmark lists from other people who are interested in the same challenge (which are usually listed on the Challenge cache's page).  So you can go through those lists looking for people who appear to live nearby and the caches they found or are thinking of finding.

Organization!

Lists of Lists

This all sounds very geeky and obsessive-compulsive, particularly when you look at some of the challenges (Find 500 caches in one day!).  Still, one has to be a bit geeky and obsessive-compulsive to geocache in the first place, so not surprisingly Challenge Caches are very popular.  Some of the most popular varieties include Blackout Caches (find all the caches in a city or region), DeLorme challenges (find a cache on every page in a state's DeLorme atlas), or the aforementioned challenge of finding every Difficulty/Terrain combination (known in Washington and other states as the Fizzy Challenge).  Incidentally, challenges are usually broken up by state/province, if only because it wouldn't be fair to have someone in Florida have to find the final container for your popular challenge cache in Enumclaw.

I, being geeky and obsessive-compulsive, have taken up a few of these challenges.  Some, like the Cache by Numbers challenge I already completed without knowing it (well, completed it except for getting the cache in Lynnwood).  Others, like the Puzzler's Puzzle Challenge or Washington State Top 10 Cache Challenge, I'm partly through and happy to complete (the latter means a trip to Orcas Island!).  Others are on my radar but far from completion (like the Fizzy Challenge) or I doubt I will ever complete (Washington State History Challenge, consisting of the oldest active caches in the state, many of which are high in the mountains).  At the very least, though, this allows a geocacher to focus on something other than finding the next magnetic key holder under a bench.

Lamoracke maintains a good Bookmark list of Washington State challenge caches.

Mmmm.  Corn Maze.

Upcoming

(italics = new since last time)

• San Juan Island Quest - September 22.  12 or 24 hour adventure race.  Mountain biking, foot and (quelle surprise!) kayaking will be involved.
• Choose Your Own Adventure Alleycat - September 22.  Bike racing as a fundraiser for more bike racing!  I can get behind that.
• Fremont Oktoberfest Street Scramble - September 23.  Course design by yours truly. It's awesome.
• Three15er Rogaine - September 29-30, Naches. 4 hours, 9 hours, or 24 hours in the forests of the Cascades.  Note that the 24-hour race is the actual, honest to goodness North American Rogaining Championships.  Probably won't show up on Wide World of Sports, though.
• First Thursday Adventure Run - October 4, Green Lake.  Last time, I actually won something!  But the $1 beers would probably keep me coming anyway.
• Lake Sammamish Orienteering - October 7, Lake Sammamish State Park.  No, you don't actually go running in the lake, silly.
• Sunset Hill Hood Hunt - October 13.  Just call it Ballard if you like.  Start at 10:15, end at 11:30, find checkpoints in a 1 square mile area.  Free, {but/because there are} no prizes and you have to print your own map.
• Choose Your Corn Maze Adventure - October 14, Bob's Corn Maze, Snohomish.  Orienteering in a corn maze.  This should be interesting.  Starts early, before the maze opens to the general public, who would probably be confused by strangely-attired folks running through the maze.  I don't know, though, maybe next time they should just issue the orienteers Halloween costumes and have them scare the other folks.  Haunted Corn Maze!
• Art Dash for Ca$h - October 20.  12 hour (10am-10pm) Bike Scavenger Hunt for public art.  Teams of two or more required.  Cash prizes of some sort.  I am definitely intrigued.

Photo Credits

Stinkoman by HomestarRunner.com

Lists by Amy T Schubert via photo pin cc
Corn maze by Art Institute of Portland via photo pin cc

Catching Features

It's a secret checkpoint.  Yay!  From a week ago.  Boo.

This Saturday is National Orienteering Day, so let's talk about an orienteering strategy that you probably use already even though you don't know it.

A catching feature is something obvious that is past the point where you want to go.  If you see your catching feature, you know you've gone too far.  Consider the picture above (click on the link for more detail), from last Thursday's Green Lake Adventure Run.  You want to find the checkpoint at the traffic circle, which is clearly a block or so up from Green Lake Way.  But how do you know when to turn?  If you examine the map closely (and assuming you are coming from the east), you can see there is a building (depicted as a black rectangle) to the south of Green Lake Way a block past the street you want to turn up.  And it's the first building on the south side of the street for a number of blocks, so it's easy to spot.  This is your catching feature.  If you see the building, you know that's a street too far.

You've certainly used catching features in real life yourself.  For example, if I'm explaining to you how to get to Camp Seymour (on the Key Peninsula west of Gig Harbor), I will say something like this.  From Purdy, travel about 5 miles west on Highway 302, then turn left on 134th Ave KP N.  If you see the Shell station, you've gone too far.  The Shell station is your catching feature.  

Catching features should be hard to miss, and ideally easy to recover from.  That is, if you see the Shell station, you can just pull into the station and go back to the last intersection.  If you see the building at Green Lake, just turn around and go back to the previous street.  A billboard on an Interstate highway when the next exit is 10 miles down the road?  Probably not such a good catching feature.

Catching features are obviously useful as a sort of 'sanity check' to keep you on course.  They have other uses as well.

• If you have a catching feature, you can usually go faster to the next checkpoint, since you don't have to pay as much attention to where you are as you go along.  Catching features are thus particularly useful in long legs of an orienteering course, since you can concentrate on running the long distance as fast as you can, secure in the knowledge that you can slow down once you see the fence, or trail, or big lake, or whatever.
• If you're unsure about how long it will take to get to the next checkpoint, a catching feature is very helpful.  In a checkpoint race with a map, you can usually get a feel for how long it will take to get to the next checkpoint after you've done a few checkpoints and are used to the map scale.  But for the first few checkpoints when you're not quite sure how far it is to the checkpoint, a catching feature can help you know when to stop.
  
  Similarly, if a particular checkpoint is easier or harder to reach than others, a catching feature helps make up for the fact that you may not be able to easily judge how far you've gone.  So if all the checkpoints have been on flat ground, but this one is uphill, a catching feature gives you something to look for as you labor up the hill. Or when riding a bike, if all the checkpoints have been downtown so far (where the going is slow due to stoplights and traffic), and the next one is a couple of miles away down a bike trail, you'll probably want to create a catching feature so you don't blow right by it.

The Cascade Orienteering Club has a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' meet at Woodland Park this Saturday morning, September 15.  You'll get a map with a bunch of checkpoints, and you get to choose the order to visit them.  If you find them all, you head back and get a second map.  It starts at 11:15 and ends at 12:30.  If you show up early, there will be people on hand to teach you about orienteering, including, say, catching features.

So many chances to get lost in Seattle this Saturday

Upcoming

(italics = new since last time)

• Choose Your Own Adventure #4 - September 15, Woodland Park.  It's National Orienteering Day, so get out there.  If you've never orienteered before, this is the event for you.  It's Woodland Park, so there are woods (duh), but you can't really get lost in them (just follow the traffic noise to Aurora or the sporty yelling to the ballfields).  Also, off-leash dogs, lawn bowling, and maybe a few bunnies.  Mass start at 11:15am.
• Oyster Urban Adventure Race - September 15.  They also put on an outdoor adventure race in Bend, Oregon.
• Redonkulous Scavenger Hunt - September 15, Seattle Center.  Sounds like an honest-to-goodness scavenger hunt.  First prize is a longboard (that's a type of skateboard, grandpa), but you don't actually have to know how to skateboard to compete.
• Keen Urban Playground Scavenger Hunt - September 15, Olympia.  This, on the other hand, sounds like one of those Amazing Race kind of things, rather than a scavenger hunt.  Papa needs a new pair of sandals!
• Urban Goose Chase - September 15.  Apparently September 15 is national scavenger hunt/urban adventure race day and nobody told me.
• Scavenger Dash - September 15.  See above.  Unless I'm missing something, this is 4 of these on the same day.
• San Juan Island Quest - September 22.  12 or 24 hour adventure race.  Mountain biking, foot and (quelle surprise!) kayaking will be involved.
• Choose Your Own Adventure Alleycat - September 22.  Bike racing as a fundraiser for more bike racing!  I can get behind that.
• Fremont Oktoberfest Street Scramble - September 23.  Course design by yours truly. It's awesome.
• Three15er Rogaine - September 29-30, Naches. 4 hours, 9 hours, or 24 hours in the forests of the Cascades.  Note that the 24-hour race is the actual, honest to goodness North American Rogaining Championships.  Probably won't show up on Wide World of Sports, though.
• First Thursday Adventure Run - October 4, Green Lake.  Last time, I actually won something!  But the $1 beers would probably keep me coming anyway.
• Sunset Hill Hood Hunt - October 13.  Just call it Ballard if you like.  Start at 10:15, end at 11:30, find checkpoints in a 1 square mile area.  Free, but no prizes and you have to print your own map(s).

Also:  It's another armchair treasure hunt book!  The first in a projected series.  We shall see.  I don't know if any of these (beyond the first ones, such as Masquerade and Treasure: In Search of the Golden Horse) have made their money back, so the likelihood we'll see a second is doubtful.  Still, the $250,000 grand prize is probably real.

Geocache puzzle(s) of the week:  Totally Tubular, Totally Tubular II, Totally Tubular III.  Deservedly the most favorite series of caches in Seattle.  They aren't hard to find; the puzzle is what to do with them once you find them.  Hint:  don't stick your fingers or a stick or any other object inside.

Photo Credits

Map:  Cascade Orienteering Club.

Puzzle hunt logo:  Kristi Sundquist