MnGCA

[msteffel]

I know it's still cold out there, but this is Minnesota & people are still finding those caches! Found a good cache lately? Think others should know about it? Nominate it for Cache of the Month for March.

Nominations for March CotM is open from now till the end of February, so get those nominations in now while there hot, err, cold, err, cool.

Check the Nomination Guidelines or the (hopefully) soon to be coming CotM Frequently Asked Questions for more info about the nomination process.

[sparkyfry]

This might be a new reason to nominate a cache, but I'm nominating Unequivocally Puzzle Valley (GC22CVH) because of the effect it had on caching in the area.

First of all, it made "Puzzle Valley" a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the 36 days between when the cache was published and when it was first found, several new but fair puzzles were published in the area in an effort to discover the location of the cache. There are 97 caches total in Golden Valley, a geographically small city. 46 are traditionals; 46 are puzzles. 14 caches were published in Golden Valley since January 24; all of them are puzzles.

Many teams of cachers also tried to brute force it the old-fashioned way. I developed a whole new level of respect for the art of brute forcing seeing what everybody was doing because of this puzzle.

At one point, the puzzle was ranked as the most difficult puzzle in the world among all the puzzles listed on geocheck.org. It had 2,800 wrong answers and 0 right at one point.

In the end, a cacher with 105 finds cracked the puzzle just as the brute forcers were about to crack it.

[msteffel]

Get those Cache of the Month nominations in! March CotM nominations are only open till the end of February.

[msteffel]

Apparently no one wanted to go up against the puzzle juggernaught that is Unequivocally Puzzle Valley. Since there were no other caches nominateds for March Cache of the Month, Bobcam's UPV is the winner (nominated by sparkyfry). Congratulations to Bobcam!