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Treasure Hunts
Jan. 31st, 2007 08:52 pmEach year, during the St. Paul Winter Carnival, the St. Paul paper hides a medallion in one of the public parks in the area. (It's usually a St. Paul city park, but sometimes is a Ramsey County park.) Then they publish clues each day in the newspaper. The person who finds the medallion wins a cash prize.
This year, the medallion was found unusually fast -- after just three clues -- so they decided to re-hide it and let people compete for a second, smaller prize. (The first go-round, the finder won $10,000. The second finder will win $5,000.)
I've known about the medallion hunt since 1996 -- it's one of those things that's impossible to miss if you live in the area -- but I've never gone out to hunt for it. However, this year, it occurred to me that Molly would be totally fascinated by the idea of a real-life treasure hunt with mysterious, cryptic clues, so I told her about it. She nagged me a couple of times to buy a copy of the Pioneer Press so she could read the clues, and today when she got home, I looked it up online and found out that while the park it's in is pretty well established now (Central Park in Roseville -- not, unfortunately, a park that's at all convenient to me) it hasn't been found yet. Molly wanted to go hunt. So I called a friend to babysit for Kiera, bundled up myself and Molly in layers of very warm clothes, and drove her to Roseville.
This would be a much, much better story if we'd found it, but I'll just tell you up front that we didn't. It would have been unbelievable dumb luck if we had. We also wouldn't have won the whole $5,000, as it turns out -- to win the full prize, you have to buy a Winter Carnival button and register it by January 22nd. (I neglected to actually look up the rules before heading to Roseville, and spent the whole time we were hunting fretting over the fact that I didn't know if we needed to have a Winter Carnival button to claim the money at all.)
People traditionally bring shovels to dig through the snow. There isn't a whole lot of snow on the ground this year, so I brought a small shovel for Molly plus a small rake for myself. (Both are part of a set of kid gardening tools that we bought during Molly's obsessive gardening days.) Somewhat to my surprise, I saw no other kids there other than Molly; you'd think lots of kids would be fascinated by the idea of a real-life buried treasure. (Last year it was found by a couple of teenagers, and I did see two girls who looked high-school-aged.) The rake was the perfect tool for this.
I told Molly that if they hadn't found it by Saturday I'd take her back to dig some more. But I read on the website that they can call it off if no one finds it by midnight tomorrow. It's not clear to me if that means that they will, or if it means that they can if they want to.
Despite not finding the medallion, it was surprisingly fun to look for it. There were a lot of other people out digging, most in the area of the park closest to Lexington Avenue, which was mentioned in today's clue. (We were digging east of there, because of where we parked.) I ran into a guy with camo hunter's gear who had all the clues clipped from the paper and taped into a notebook; he was absolutely certain that WE were in the right spot (roughly) to find it. I'm not so sure. There's a blog where the clues are analyzed and the blog author thinks it's in an area of the park that I saw as we were leaving, where I saw no one looking at all.
Next year, I really have to buy a button and register it.
This year, the medallion was found unusually fast -- after just three clues -- so they decided to re-hide it and let people compete for a second, smaller prize. (The first go-round, the finder won $10,000. The second finder will win $5,000.)
I've known about the medallion hunt since 1996 -- it's one of those things that's impossible to miss if you live in the area -- but I've never gone out to hunt for it. However, this year, it occurred to me that Molly would be totally fascinated by the idea of a real-life treasure hunt with mysterious, cryptic clues, so I told her about it. She nagged me a couple of times to buy a copy of the Pioneer Press so she could read the clues, and today when she got home, I looked it up online and found out that while the park it's in is pretty well established now (Central Park in Roseville -- not, unfortunately, a park that's at all convenient to me) it hasn't been found yet. Molly wanted to go hunt. So I called a friend to babysit for Kiera, bundled up myself and Molly in layers of very warm clothes, and drove her to Roseville.
This would be a much, much better story if we'd found it, but I'll just tell you up front that we didn't. It would have been unbelievable dumb luck if we had. We also wouldn't have won the whole $5,000, as it turns out -- to win the full prize, you have to buy a Winter Carnival button and register it by January 22nd. (I neglected to actually look up the rules before heading to Roseville, and spent the whole time we were hunting fretting over the fact that I didn't know if we needed to have a Winter Carnival button to claim the money at all.)
People traditionally bring shovels to dig through the snow. There isn't a whole lot of snow on the ground this year, so I brought a small shovel for Molly plus a small rake for myself. (Both are part of a set of kid gardening tools that we bought during Molly's obsessive gardening days.) Somewhat to my surprise, I saw no other kids there other than Molly; you'd think lots of kids would be fascinated by the idea of a real-life buried treasure. (Last year it was found by a couple of teenagers, and I did see two girls who looked high-school-aged.) The rake was the perfect tool for this.
I told Molly that if they hadn't found it by Saturday I'd take her back to dig some more. But I read on the website that they can call it off if no one finds it by midnight tomorrow. It's not clear to me if that means that they will, or if it means that they can if they want to.
Despite not finding the medallion, it was surprisingly fun to look for it. There were a lot of other people out digging, most in the area of the park closest to Lexington Avenue, which was mentioned in today's clue. (We were digging east of there, because of where we parked.) I ran into a guy with camo hunter's gear who had all the clues clipped from the paper and taped into a notebook; he was absolutely certain that WE were in the right spot (roughly) to find it. I'm not so sure. There's a blog where the clues are analyzed and the blog author thinks it's in an area of the park that I saw as we were leaving, where I saw no one looking at all.
Next year, I really have to buy a button and register it.
