Puzzle #6: A Minnesota Treasure Hunt (2020)

This one was a Minnesota Treasure hunt with a $50 cash prize! It kicked off with a trailhead video that dropped on YouTube on October 3, 2020.

As it turns out, our treasure hunter’s adventure didn’t end once the mini treasure chest was located, it was only just beginning. I’ll tell you all about that, but first… You may have noticed at the outset that the intro seemed to have been “taken over” by our enigmatic stranger, Ken Thoriving.

Full disclosure? I very reluctantly agreed well in advance to take a leap of faith and help Ken out based off very little information—he has a message, an agenda, that even now to me seems not entirely clear, but perhaps with fresh eyes—YOUR fresh eyes, it’s something we can look into together.

First, we’ll work on this treasure hunt puzzle to it’s solution, and then we’ll get to how Ken plays into this and where it goes from there, so let’s jump in.

I’ll start out by saying this old video footage was provided to me by Ken—it seems to depict some sort of chemicals being fed and injected into farm animals. A little unsettling to be honest. The words that appear, also, provided by Ken. They feel like a plea of some kind. Nothing of what he gave me came with any sort of explanation other than “use this to point to your treasure”.

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Putting The Pieces Together

Our first real glimpse at the puzzle comes at the 26 second mark. Looks like a map, albeit a very incomplete map. In the lower right, circles are shown. One is filled in, and the numbers one through four quickly flash above the circles. The number two circle is filled in.

This means that there are four such map pieces to look for, which makes sense considering it’s hard to make heads or tails of what this particular piece means. So… the search for the map pieces continues.

At the 31 second mark, a very blurry QR code appears and moves from the top left corner to the bottom left corner, along with the words “we must look back”. Actually the complete phrase is “Sometimes in order to look forward, we must look back”. The QR code is too blurry to be scanned, but taken with the phrase “We must look back”, it makes us wonder… “Where have we seen a QR code before?”

The campfire prize draw for puzzle #5 showed a QR code on the back of a clipboard… the very same QR code and clipboard that appeared in the glitchy “future” dashcam video from the wild Machine puzzle from #5.

Either way, it’s the same QR code, and leads us to another map piece… this is piece #1.

Further into the video, Ken’s words sort of morph into what apprears to be a partial URL for a YouTube video. Using this URL and looking this video up on YouTube, we get sent HERE.

More full disclosure: Ken had asked me for one of the map pieces in advance and told me not to ask questions, he said it did not matter which one. I sent #3 to him. Days later, this URL was provided to me by Ken with no explanation.

The YouTube clip is “unlisted”… this means you can’t just stumble into it in a YouTube rabbit hole by accident or even search for it. The only way to see this is if you have the URL for it.

But who is he? He seems like he wants to help… his YouTube handle is “Stinger”, he sounds like he’s from the UK maybe?, and what the heck is “Folkmoot”?!? What do the numbers “8197” mean? How does Ken know this guy? So many questions. I feel like we are only just beginning to learn about this fella… so stay on your toes.

Stinger shows us another map piece, albeit upside down. For ease of view, I've got it in the evidence column on the right.

The fourth and final piece is really easy— a clue in the video basically says “hey, go look on Truck's Twitter page”, and there it is, map piece #4!

With the map complete, one can now look it over and try to figure out where it’s pointing to. Go ahead and give it a peek!

An easter egg: The song in the background of the video is being played backwards… but it’s the song “When The Water Falls” by Collective Soul… an homage to the treasure’s location…

After this puzzle video went live on October 3rd, at noon… barely two hours had passed before Josh Ellingson had contacted me to let me know that he and his partner-in-crime Craig Heinen had located the treasure, located at Vermillion Falls Park in Hastings! They won a $50 prize, which I’m sure they totally split.

Little did Josh & Craig know… their adventure was only just beginning, and from here, what went down was ALL Ken.

But first—an honorable mention to Steve Towey, who located the treasure site about an hour after Josh & Craig, only to find the site barren of treasure… sadly, in his trek from Eden Prairie, he hadn’t received the news that the treasure had been found. Sorry Steve—great solving, but just got there a little too late!!

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The Adventure Takes A Turn

Now, from here, Ken took our hunters (and truthfully me as well) on a journey through Vermillion Falls Park with another section of a completely new map, with a poem. See… Ken had handed me a small plastic envelope with some sort of message inside which I attached to the bottom of the treasure chest, the contents of which I was not made aware of at the time, but it contained what looked like a piece of another map.

The poem on the map section read:
“Head east, keep walking. To the left, a bridge you’ll plainly see. Find the one that stands apart. Stinger has the key.”

This map pretty much spells out where to go next, and it’s about a quarter mile walk through the woods until you reach a bridge with hundreds of locks on it. Once it was located, a combination was needed to open the lock. "Stinger has the key", which was 8197. Inside the lock was the second part to the map, which is telling our hunters to continue past the bridge and continue to follow the path…

The poem on this section of the map reads:
“Follow the path til there is no more, until you hear the river's roar. The eyes inside will point the way, to the story that is stashed away.

After another relatively short stroll, the path winds down to a set of old mill ruins along the Vermillion River. It mentions “The Eyes Inside” in the verse of the poem, with what looks like a diagram of what “the eyes inside” actually are on the map, with directions to “LOOK UP”.

Inside the ruins, our hunters were able to locate “the eyes”, and above them was a small space just above head-height that contained a small velvet pouch, which contained a thumb drive.

The thumb drive conatined a small text file named README that read:

The thumb drive also contained a video that is a minute and forty-five seconds long. In it, we learn so much more about Ken than we’ve known previously.

There is a great deal to unpack here: An evil corporation, missing kids at a corn maze, a divorce, the same kid going missing again later on… and now Ken is in hiding. What does he know that is so valuable that he needs to hide? Why is he trusting us to help him out?

Ken shot his video the night of October 2nd, the night before the treasure hunt the following day.

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Dispatches From Ken

On Thanksgiving Day, I decided to share some of the footage from the morning he confronted me at Vermillion Falls. At the time, I really just thought he was some nutcase. I posted it to my channel under the title “Dispatches From Ken”, and included it in our files on the right. I would implore you to watch this.

He has occasionally surfaced on Facebook to post every now and again, but outside the Dispatches video, nobody has heard from him or knows where he is. His daughter, I believe, is still missing, sadly. Attempts to contact him have failed.

I now believe that Ken’s “harrassment” was nothing more than a terribly misguided plea for help. I don’t think Ken is a bad person after all, and I hope there’s something we can do to help him once we know more. As awkward as it is, this is where we are now.