About this geocaching series:
Since there is a serious shortage of puzzle caches in the
Bryan/College Station area, I have put together a series of them,
each with a different theme and unique puzzles to solve. They will
also have varying levels of difficulty, but I have designed the
puzzles to be solvable without needing extensive specialized
knowledge. Please refrain from posting in your logs any hints to
either the puzzles or the actual cache locations. However, I do
encourage you to work with others. I will not post any hints (with
the exception of this cache), but if you keep having trouble after
repeated attempts at solving them, feel free to send me a message
and I can point you in the right direction. I want these to be
challenging but still fun to do. So good luck and happy trails.
THE CACHE IS NOT AT THE POSTED COORDINATES!
Back when I was a Boy Scout, our troop would go on campouts
religiously every two months. On one particular outing in Southern
California, five of us boys came across a huge bush of (what we
thought to be) poison oak. After staring at it for a few seconds,
one of the boys (call him Derek) started to brag that he was immune
to poison oak and then proceeded to walk through it, brushing up
against the leaves. Some of the boys laughed and thought it was
cool, but one boy (call him John) didn't believe the patch of
leaves was really poison oak. So to call Derek's bluff, John began
rubbing the leaves all over his arms and face, exclaiming "this
isn't poison oak, you liar!" After about a minute, our leader walks
back and witnesses John sitting in the bush. He screams at him to
get out of there and begs to know what came over John to jump in a
patch of poison oak. Sheepishly, John scuttled off with our leader
to a nearby creek to try and rub the oil off of his skin using mud
and water. For the rest of the trip, John had the worst poison oak
rash I had ever seen. And, as it turned out, Derek came out totally
unaffected. Maybe he was immune to it afterall.
Although we don't see as much poison oak in this part of Texas, we
do have to watch out for poison ivy. And as geocaching takes us
through many wooded areas, it is important to be able to identify
it if we see it. So as part of my puzzle cache series, I thought I
would hide a cache to help do just that.
Poison Ivy exhibits five distinguishing characterisitics:
1) three divided leaves (remember the phrase "leaves of three, let
it be")
2) the center leaflet sits on a longer stalk than the two leaves on
the side
3) you can often see white, waxy berries along the stem
4) the three-leaf bunches alternate along the stem
5) it grows as an erect shrub or as a climbing vine
Below you will see 11 links to various images. Three of these are
pictures of poison ivy, and the rest are imposters. Use the
descriptions above to help you. Some of the imposters look very
similar, but I think the images give just enough away to help you
see the differences. In order to find the cache, you need to
identify the three poison ivy pictures.
1.
Image 1
2. Image
2
3. Image
3
4.
Image 4
5.
Image 5
6.
Image 6
7.
Image 7
8.
Image 8
9.
Image 9
10.
Image 10
11.
Image 11
Multiply these three numbers together and call this number Z. Then
solve the following equations to identify the coordinates.
For the North coordinate, (Z*6)-18 = ???
N 30 34._ _ _
For the West coordinate, (Z*6)-7 = ???
W 096 17._ _ _
There's no reason poison ivy should drag anyone down while
geocaching if we get better at identifying it. I do not want this
to be very difficult so if you get stuck I've encrypted a hint for
this one.
By the way, in honor of this cache's theme I have hidden the
container in a large patch of poison ivy.
...just kidding!
Kudos to JJball (with another FTF on this series) for not getting
fooled by sheep in wolves' clothing.