This cache is available during daylight
hours ONLY and is courtesy of the open placement park list by the
Fairfax County Park Authority. You can check the list of approved
parks here:
http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/parks/geocaching.htm
From Wikipedia: Atbash is a simple
substitution cipher for the Hebrew alphabet. It consists of
substituting aleph (the first letter) for tav (the last), beth (the
second) for shin (one before last), and so on, reversing the
alphabet. ... It has been associated with the esoteric
methodologies of Jewish mysticism's interpretations of Hebrew
religious texts as in the Kabbalah.
You can find on-line resources that will
convert the cipher text into regular text if you do not want to
make the conversion manually.
The Atbash cipher is another direct
substitution cipher like the Ceasar shift, but it reverses the
alphabet instead of simply shifting the letters a fixed number of
digits from the starting point. It is considered to be a very weak
cipher since it has only one possible key, compared to the 25
variations that are possible with a Ceasar shift. Wikipedia points
out that a few English words 'Atbash' into other English words. For
example, "hob"="sly", "hold"="slow", "holy"="slob", "horn"="slim",
"zoo"="all", "irk"="rip", "low"="old", "glow"="told", and
"grog"="tilt". The cipher text below also has been split at a
different place to make it more difficult to detect the starting
point.
mgure vlmvv rtsgd
vhgav ilhve vmhve vmwvt ivvhl mvlmv klrmg urevu revgs ivvml igsgs
ivvvr tsgwv tivvh ureva vilklr
NOTICE: Please be respectful of the posted
park hours. If you enter the park after hours you are trespassing.
If you are stopped you can be ticketed or arrested and will put the
future of geocaching in the parks in jeopardy.
(Note -- background image is not relevant for completing this
task.)