Ski World Mystery Cache

Here are the instructions for the original puzzle that I stole for this cache:

It's a crazy quilt and a Word Search combined! Each of the words in the list can be found in a continuous line in an irregularly shaped patch in the puzzle diagram. Move from letter to letter vertically or horizontally, but not diagonally. Each letter in the diagram will be used once; the patches do not overlap. We have located one word to start you off.

"Hmmm...", you say. "Billrow must have gone senile! He forgot to include the list of words. And where is the startup word that was promised? And what are all those squares with little numbers instead of letters?" Well, I decided to make the puzzle just a little harder, since cachers are obviously much smarter than the average muggle! The word list is not provided (although you can find exactly half of the words within the last paragraph on this page). You will need to use some logic, and the cache title, to figure out the words you need. Of the words NOT found on this page, six are items of attire, five are different styles of the related activity, one word is hyphenated, and one is actually the two-word name of a type of food.

To add a bit more of a challenge, I have removed the starting letter of each word, and replaced it with a number. When you have filled in the puzzle, you will need to find a number in a square corresponding to each letter in the coords as displayed below, to come up with the final coords. Yes, there will be more than one possible number for most of the letters; but you should be able to deduce the correct numbers to use. Also, (with only ONE exception) there is no duplication of any letter/number combination when filling in the empty squares. For example, every square with a "9" will have a different letter. (Unless "9" should happen to be that one exception!) ;-) In addition to the starting letters used in encoding of the final coords, there are two words starting with each of the letters N and L. You can check your result here.

Whether you are a novice or expert solver, you may have to ramp up your skills to come up with all the word fittings for this puzzle. Hopefully it won't turn out to drive you daffy! I hope you are first out of the gate in the race for FTF! And of course, I hope you will be a good sport when out on the caching trail. There's no need to resort to any special gear or equipment to find the cache (although it's NOT as easy as a Light Pole Cache!) No mountain, steep slope, or other tough conditions are involved, that could cause you to lose your balance. Have fun!