Puzzle Master: White Belt Mystery Cache

Upon completing this series, a cacher will be exposed to several different types of mystery caches; ciphers, hidden solutions, seganography and research solutions. A relatively new cacher or puzzle solver should see their experience level and their confidence improve, and should be able to tackle some of the tougher mystery caches out there.

This series relies on two assumptions; that the solver lives in or is familiar with the west valley (Phoenix, Arizona) area, and that the cacher has some experience with traditional finds and has placed one cache on their own. If you have not placed a geocache of your own, I highly encourage you to do so, as you will learn and observe some of the ways that information can be concealed. Not to mention, you'll provide me with more caches to find!

The White Belt:

My children recently began studying and practicing Tae Kwon Do, and I became fascinated with the color belt ranking system. The white belt is the first level of TKD, and assumes no knowledge of martial arts. At this level, instruction focuses on the basics, teaching basic stances, blocks, simple punches and kicks.

At this level of puzzle solving, we are going to focus on the basics. Let's begin.

Let's start by taking a look at the make up of a typical coordinate set:

As you can see, each coordinate is made up of a direction (typically north and west), degrees, minutes and a decimal of the minutes. This is a system known as degrees and minutes (decimal), or DMD. This system is designed as a compromise between the original degrees, minutes seconds (DMS) that most people have seen on maps and the decimal degrees (DecDeg) that your GPSr understands.

The first thing to understand is the limits of your possible solution. In Arizona, all solutions should fall somewhere between a latitude of N 31º and N 37º, and a longitude of W 109º and 114º.

Narrowing it down a bit more to the West Valley, most coordinates will be somewhere around N 33º and W 112º.

Another rule of thumb to remember is that Groundspeak encourages the fake coordinates to be no more than 1-2 miles away from the real coordinates. So if your solution shows the cache is 20 miles away, you might want to check your work.

The next step is to figure out how many digits you need to solve. Look at the information the puzzle creator provides for you. They may give you something like:

N 33º xx.xxx W 112º xx.xxx

Which tells you that you only need to solve the minutes and decimal of both the north and west. A total of ten digits.

N 33º 28.xxx W 112º 18.xxx

This looks even easier, doesn't it? You only need to solve the three digit decimal portion of the minutes.

If you will notice, the coordinates are broken into seven digits for northing and eight digits for westing. Look at the puzzle in the cache page and see if you find a pattern of something that matches the number of digits you seek.

Or, the cache owner might make it a bit tough and assume that you know the degrees (33º 112º) and only leave you to solve the minutes/decimal. Instead of fifteen digits, you may only have to solve ten; five in the latitude and five in the longitude. Or, you might even get the degrees and minutes, and only have to solve three digits in the decimal portion of both northing and westing, for a total of six digits to search for. Look for a pattern in the cache description page that matches the missing information.

Searching for Clues:

Clues to your solution can be found anywhere. Pay attention to the cache's title, description, attributes, difficulty and terrain rating. Read everything on the cache page carefully, and look for any patterns that help you fill in these blanks. Let's take a look at a sample puzzle cache:

Did you notice the name of the cache is "Third of Five"? Try looking at the third digit in each row of five numbers. Use these digits to solve the missing coordinates.

Check your example solution here.