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LT7 - On the Rail Fence Mystery Cache

Hidden : 11/25/2012
Difficulty:
2.5 out of 5
Terrain:
2.5 out of 5

Size: Size:   micro (micro)

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Geocache Description:

Less Than Infinity (Infinity Lite) series - caches are not at given coordinates. Caches are red, blue or purple bison tubes hanging around eye-level (+/- a foot) in trees along/near Forest Road 462.

This is an attempt to help those who do not know where to start with many of the nearby Infinity series. It also is an attempt to define my genre: poor-man's, mathematically-oriented geo-art for those who like to solve puzzles and hike, bike, ride horses or noisy vehicles in the Cibola National Forest wilderness areas in the East Mountains.

The caches are colorful and easy to spot once you locate the right tree to circle. The puzzles are straightforward once you have the right tools (which are mentioned in the descriptions).

The railfence cipher gets its name from the way the messages are coded/decoded. A plaintext message is laid out on N lines of paper, where N is the number of rails in the fence. So the message "FEED THE CAT" on a three rail fence would have F on the 1st line, then E on the 2nd line, E on the 3rd line, then D on the 2nd line, space on the 1st line, T on the second line and so on; usually the letters are laid out diagonally so the text is still readable. The coding is then reading across the first line, left to right; then onto the 2nd line, etc. Note how the spaces play into the mesasge; it is impotant not to have any spare spaces as this changes the message.

So you can either do this long hand or use an on-line cipher solver. I use rumkin.com/tools/cipher, remember, you want to Decrypt. I put in "q" to hide the spaces so replace each "q" with a space after decrypting. I recommend copy and paste to minimize typos and make sure there are no spaces at the beginning or the end of the text:

North: tefqoshvqqotoqneiidsunneetrfeerienqutqgeqoqimnyrpni

West: odeehetneqreentrqiueersgstqqeegnsqdieqeptenhihnxdnnonqitmuqiinq



*** Congrats to cyclegreen for FTF!!! ***

Additional Hints (Decrypt)

chmmyr: ahzore bs envyf vf va pnpur anzr; ab bssfrg pnpur: abg ba envy srapr, ohg va gerr

Decryption Key

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
-------------------------
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z

(letter above equals below, and vice versa)