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The cache is not located at the listed coordinates, you can however park at them.
Welcome to Jersey Valley Co Park, the government wants everyone to believe this is a flood control structure, as you will see on the plaque at the monument coordinates, but everyone around these parts knows the truth. An alien space port was discovered here in the 50's and the only way they could come up with to hide it was to fill this valley with water.
Mary and Tom had spent the day hiking around Jersey Valley Lake, and being the gadget geeks that they were had tracked there entire day on a brand new GPS. The two of them sat in a booth eatting some pie at Borgens in Westby after a beautiful day of walking. Mary was looking at the paintings on the walls when Tom asked her to look at the GPS, as he had noticed somethign odd with the breadcrumb trail the GPS said they had taken.
Lena the waitress, who should have retired atleast 20 years ago, happened to overhear there conversation, and could'nt resist the chance to tell the story of the aliens.
Lena sauntered up to the table with a smile the size of Texas across her face, and the couple looked up at her and returned the smile. That fancy piece of plastic you two got there ain't gonna do you a bit of good down by the lake she said. That alien technology thats burried in the hills sure messes up everyones new fangled electronic gizmos. Tom let out a laugh and shook his head, knowing there were no such things as aliens. Oh but you'd be wrong there son. I was there when they found it, well not right there but just up over the ridge. We saw the flash and fires and tore on down the valley to see what had happened, we saw them shooting and burning and chasing aliens all over the place. We watched as one of them ran just below us and tossed something into the woods...
Lena went on and on with the story for a good 45 minutes, and it just kept getting stranger and stranger. Tom thanked her for such a good story, but knew it could only be a story. Mary on the other hand was actually listening to the story, and remembered part of it and asked Lena to tell them more about the piece that her family had found and hidden in the valley, an alien abacus she called it.
Oh you were listnin my dear. Not many folks pay close enough attention to catch that bit. If you want to go look, you can see for yourself. I'm no spring chicken, might as well see if you youngins can make any sense of what we found.
My brother had been part of the Navy and when he was in there, they had taught him all kinds of cipers and codes and ways to hide things, so he figured since he could'nt figure out how to decode the abacus, we should hide it away until we met someone who could. Well its been over 50 years now and everyone but me has passed who knows about its location, and no one we ever met could solve it. My brother always said he thought it was a code to show the location of something in the valley that they came for, we always hoped it was a treasure, but we sure couldnt ever find anything.
We hid the abacus where we used to play as kids. My baby sister was a surveyor and between her and my brother they made sure you had to follow a specific trail to get to the abacus, and hopefully once you find it, you can solve it and find out what it was really for.
One guy we met thought he had it figured out, and he said the key was that you had to find the side that pretended to be NORTH, and then you can figure out what way is WEST, and the opposite of WEST was NORTH. He said using that figuring he was able to determine a location, but all he found there was a HUGE tree, standing tall and proud.
He also said something about creating darkness, then blackness and being shown the light to the location, but we think he might have been crazy...
To get to the first clue, look at the monument, and fill in the blanks.
43 41.ABC 90 48.XYZ
A = 1st number in Volume of Fill cubic yards
B = The number of letters in the word Project
C = 1st number in Water Surface Area
X = Last number in recreation storage feet
Y = The number of letters in the word Purpose
Z = 1st number in floodwater retarding storage acre feet
This is a HARD multistage field solvable puzzle, if you don't enjoy hiking, bush wacking, steep terrain, mud, and putting your hands in strange places, you may want to skip this one. Bring your caching tool bag with you, because when you get to the abacus, you are not going to want to walk back to your car to get that thing you forgot.
Feel free to post pics of you and the abacus, pictures alone won't help the next people figure it out.
Notification form has been sent to Rod Engh of Vernon County Parks.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Svany vf ng A 43° 41.AAA J 090° 48.JJJ