Magellan's GPS Treasure Hunt Comes to MN

...Comes to the Twin Cities

The week of July 15 to July 19, Magellan's GPS Treasure Hunt came to the Twin Cities metro area. According to Magellan:

We are on the verge of uncovering the keys to a "mystery" that famed explorer Ferdinand Magellan was believed to have taken to his grave: the secret locations of treasures he hid but never reclaimed while exploring North America.

On our fictitious journey, Thales Navigation has recovered an ancient journal belonging to Magellan. To our amazement, researchers working tirelessly to restore the weathered pages and worn text of the journal have reported that they believe the pages contain clues, and even the exact coordinates, of these treasures.

Thales Navigation is offering a reward to anyone who helps find these lost treasures. As our team of researchers successfully restores the ancient manuscripts, we will post them on this website. With the rapid progress the researchers are making, we expect to provide new clues almost daily. Legend holds that there are 31 treasures in all.

The first finder of each of these caches would be rewarded with a prize ranging from a Color GPS to a vacation. The next 25 finders would get Magellan caps.

With valuable prizes on the line, the team of rickrich, dyl1231, and Abby decided to hunt for Treasures of the Lost Voyage. That would be me (rickrich a.ka. Dad), and "kids". Since the clues and the final coordinates could be posted to the website at any time over the next 2 to 5 days, the first business at hand was to develop a short script to poll the website for any changes and notify me of the changes via email, and by SMS message to a cellphone when the coordinates were posted. Since I will not use any products from a convicted monopolist, the magellan-contest.sh shell script was written to run on the Linux operating system.

The clues were posted one at a time from Tuesday to Friday night. I found that the clues were not particularly helpful in pinning down the final location of the cache...

Hint 1: We believe Magellan was describing a region for yet another hiding place somewhere that seemed to be a central region of North America with caves, beaches, waterfalls, and more. While there he caught and ate many fish and enjoyed making camp in the wilderness and looking up at the stars.

Hint 2: The only new information we've gleaned from the manuscript is a statement Magellan made referring to the area as the land of 10,000 lakes. We are investigating this lead and will keep you informed of any new developments.

Hint 3: Our research team has concluded that Magellan was undoubtedly referring to Minnesota when he wrote about the Treasure of the Lost Voyage. In fact, we believe the treasure may be somewhere near the twin cities.

Hint 4: The treasure is definitely somewhere near Minneapolis. We are working to decipher the meaning of the letters L B P. The only other journal entry that we think could possibly be linked is a statement that says, "Start on one side to get to the other."

The letters "L B P" and "Start on one side to get to the other"? Many Twin Cities area geocachers racked their brains on Friday night to figure out what location that could be, in order to get a jump on other geocachers when the final coordinates were posted. Popular among the guesses were "L" for lake, and "P" for park.

Perhaps the guess that best fit the clues given was Shingle Creek Park, in the shadow of the KLBP radio towers:

KLBP 1470 kHz
Format: WW1- standards // KLBB 1400
ID: Brooklyn Park MN
Owner: Minnesota Public Radio
Co-owned: WMNN, KLBP, KNOW-FM, KSJN
Web Site: http://www.klbbradio.com/
Facilities: 5000w/5000w
Transmitter: 45° 5' 17" N 93° 22' 59" W

With the MnGCA Summer Fling scheduled to begin at 9AM Saturday morning, I came to the conclusion that a good nights sleep was necessary and hit the sack at midnight. I placed the cell phone next to my bed, in case the coordinates were posted in the wee hours. I felt fairly certain that the coodinates would be posted in the wee hours of Saturday, or Saturday-Sunday night. My feeling was that Magellan would not post the coordinates so as to conflict with the MnGCA event.

At 7:49AM on Saturday, I awoke to the ring of the cellphone. An SMS message was waiting with the coordinates of the cache. I quickly surfed to the map of the location and determined that the cache was in Baker Park Reserve.

Baker Park is only a few miles west of our house, so we had a real shot at being FTF and getting a Color GPS prize. I got the kids up and let the dog out to do her morning business. Meanwhile, I plugged the coordinates of the cache into the MySQL database used by the GpsDrive open source navigation system.

We got everyone into the car by 8AM and were off to the cache. dyl1231 worked the GpsDrive map display on our laptop. We knew the area well, since just two days earlier we logged a FTF on Aspen Inde.

The traffic going west on 12 was uncharacteristically slow. We pondered the Magellan clues along the way. We could not figure out what the "L" in "L B P" meant. The "Start on one side to get to the other" clue seemed to imply that we should park on the other side of the road from the cache, in the park patron parking lot. I pulled into the gates of the park, told the ranger what we were up to, and asked her if it would be OK for us to park at the employee parking lot across the street and nearer to the cache. The ranger said we could not park there and pointed us to nearby patron parking.

We locked up the car and started running back towards the road. Dyl1231 commented that it was the first time he had ever seen his Dad run. We crossed over the road and headed down the trail. The cache was very near. As we crested a small hill, we could see Nicole from TeamCNJC standing on the trail. That meant that at least one geocacher had beaten us to the location. As we got to the location, we could hear two people rummaging around in the bushes. We started into the bushes, which were very thick and we had to turn back to find an entry that wouldn't require bushwhacking. As we came out, we heard Craig from TeamCNJC yell to Nicole that he had found the cache.

We headed into the bushes again at a better place and passed Craig on the way out, carrying his certificate for the Color GPS. Oh well. We ran into moleson and agreed to let each other know when we found the cache. A minute or so later I located the Treasure Chest and we became the second finders, good for a Magellan hat.

We walked out with moleson and headed home to get our stuff for the MnGCA Summer fling. We arrived about an hour late to the event, but it was an exciting way to start our day of geocaching. I was also thankful that the Magellan cache had been found so that I could get a good nights sleep on Saturday night.