The Matterhorn

Clue #3
Posted: Monday, Jan. 23, 2007

Hunters can be surly but in clue-time it’s early
Be safe, friends, and in the hunt revel
Near land that is high the treasure is nigh
Vagueness rules and that’s on the level

The dangerous clue #3! Let’s take a peek inside!

Well, they [the Pioneer Press] don’t seem to be wasting any time with torture.

Hunters can be surly but in clue-time it’s early

I might be a surly hunter. I don’t know. I tend to get very angry at least once during the hunt.

Plausible info: wordplay

Be safe, friends, and in the hunt revel

…

Plausible info: wordplay

Near land that is high the treasure is nigh

Here’s why they wrote the clue, right? While I think line 4 may have something else to chew on, here are your meat and potatoes. Parks that have graduated terrain like Como and Cherokee increase in value while flat parks are pushed towards implausibility. I would also begin tossing all small parks and to a lesser extent parks without much natural landscape. The reason I do this is because small parks (Merriam, Newell, etc) don’t have the space to register high ground within their geography, and a lack of natural landscape detracts from the idea in a similar way

….I bet you thought I might not catch Highland Park. I’ve been waiting for the medallion to find its way to this park since the year after I joined the cult in 1998… and so far they haven’t been this suggestive towards Highland. With a lot of possible fits that usually lead elsewhere, Highland has something for anyone to connect any clue with it. Call me jaded or call me intuitive, but I really don’t think they’d kick down the door and hand you the park on Tuesday. How about adjacent parks, Hidden Falls, for example? Also to be taken into consideration is the aim of the authoring squad regarding how long they want the hunt to last. It seems that with lucky premonitions aside recent hunts have shown a varying degree of when they provide keystone information. Perhaps they want this over by Friday, before people have the entire weekend to trample the park?

Well, in any event, I hope I’m wrong and it is at Highland. If this is the case you can look to fitting water towers, golf courses, disc golf courses, football fields, hockey rinks, rivers, main streets, the sight of downtown, multiple unique “zones” for the park, and anything else you can think of to figure it all out with. Terrible.

Plausible info: park name, terrain

Vagueness rules and that’s on the level

The goof in me wants to think there’s someone with the surname “Vagueness”. Peter Vagueness, CPA. He keeps a Burger King crown on his porch. I bet he lives near the Southwest corner of the park on one edge of a hill… and if you stand near his house you can eyeball the other side perfectly where a U-Haul location just opened up.

Plausible info: wordplay, history, orienteering