Puzzle #4: A Minnesota Treasure Hunt (2020)

The first Minnesota Treasure Hunt (Puzzle #2) went so well that I decided to do another later the same summer! We were still in the Summer of COVID. The trailhead video dropped on YouTube on August 7, 2020.

There’s a lot of ground to cover here, because much like with the treasure hunt Puzzle #2, we ended up getting a lot more than we bargained for when all was said and done, and I’ll explain this later. First off, big congrats to Johannes from the Twin Cities, who located the treasure chest in the wee hours of the morning on Thursday, August 13th. It was nearly five days between the start of the hunt and the treasure’s discovery.

So, how did we get here? Well, let’s take a gander at the video for Puzzle #4, which will give us an idea of where to look for this hidden treasure.

Puzzle #4 Solution video

It's admittedly a simple scene: We're in the ice cream aisle at a grocery store. Our video gets interrupted by an ad. Truck walks by with a shopping cart, opens the freezer, reaches in and gets some ice cream. As he walks away we zoom into a big clue on the glass door of the freezer. It's a piece of paper with a couple of holes cut out, a road sign by a sidewalk, and the words "I scream! You scream! We look both ways, then reign supreme!"

The overarching theme here, unquestionably, is ICE CREAM. I mean, it takes place in the ice cream section of a supermarket (and if I’m being honest, one look at me will tell you I’m a guy who loves his ice cream!) Also, on the poster attached to the glass, we have the lines “I scream”, and “you scream”, which is a reference to the popular saying “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!”

Here’s a fun fact from a little internet research: This saying was actually from a popular song by the same name that came out back in 1925.

So now we know that ice cream is the more obvious centerpiece of this puzzle. But with ice cream shops and trucks all over the place in the summer, how do we narrow this down to a specific place?

A clue was given via social media on Wednesday, August 12th: " Be patient, and curb your enthusiasm. What does this mean?

Well, “be patient” quite literally means to be patient, to ride this video out to the end, where you get the best view of the poster on the glass freezer case. “Curb your enthusiasm” is simply a reference to the curb on the poster. If you look closely, you can see a line of morse code. When decoded, it spells out “STILLWATER”, which is a northeast suburb in the Twin Cities metro.

This might be enough to get you to where you needed to go, but there was also another pretty big clue. If you’ve been following my puzzle videos, you know that audio clues often play a big role, and this one’s no exception.

If you listen carefully to the music, and it helps if you’re from Gen X like me, it’s a lovely rendition of the song “Love And Affection” by the rock band Nelson.

So with “ice cream” as our centerpiece, we now have Stillwater, and Nelson. You may be already putting the pieces together… Most Twin Cities ice cream aficionados have made the pilgrimage out to Stillwater to hit up the legendary Nelson’s Ice Cream. I absolutely recommend getting there at least once before the curtain goes up on this summer!

Now that we’ve got the location pinned down, where do we look to find the treasure? Well, our hints are again on the poster.

The cut out holes are references to the cartoon board next door to the ice cream shop, with holes cut out to put your face and take cool pictures. If you were to put your face in the holes on the board, the clue “look both ways” is telling you to cross the street. (And yes, PLEASE look both ways… don’t need any of my treasure hunters making any premature purchases of the proverbial farm!) Directly across the street from this board will bring you to a utility pole on the sidewalk, the same utility pole that is in cartoon form on the poster.

A bonus easter egg here is a photo of the treasure site hidden in the advertising that interrupts the video…

The yellow brick on the poster is the X that marks the spot where a yellow brick exists... underneath which was the Treasure!

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Uh-oh... This Guy Again?

So that is basically it, well, at least it should be… except for the minor detail that we’ve now got writing on this brick that was not present when the treaure was buried. So, what’s going on here?

If you’ve been following my videos you may recall that a mystery sticker was inside the treasure chest from Puzzle #2… this was not one of the items that I put in there when I buried it. Just before we buried it, we had a strange encounter with someone who appeared to be recording us on his phone from a nearby walking path. When we tried to approach, the person walked away. I didn’t really think too much of this until this treasure was discovered and the mystery item was found in the chest. Well, when the writing was found to be on this brick, my mind went to the same place and I wondered if this same creeper was somehow messing with my treasure hunt again.

So it appeared we had another puzzle on our hands… maybe one could call it a bonus puzzle? It did not take long for our internet sleuths both on Facebook and Reddit to decipher this… and it turned out it was a simple A1Z26 cipher. The numbers translated into letters, and the letters translated into numbers, spelling out a link to a video on the site vimeo.com, titled "we need to talk", the creator just going by "KT".

Disturbing, but it confirmed my suspicions. July 2nd was the date that my daughter and I were burying the Puzzle #2 treasure at the base of a tree next to Lake Nokomis, so this checks out. The heavy breathing was a little over the top… maybe they were wearing a mask or something, who knows.

So it seems a new game is afoot. Who is this person? What does he want? And what do they have to do with my treasure hunts?

Well, fellow treasure hunters and internet Sherlocks, keep your eyes and ears open, because I am sure this mystery is only going to deepen. As for me and my daughter, I’m just glad we’ve both got a few years of karate training under our belts! It just might come in handy at a future treasure site.