Puzzles are one of the types of geocache hides and there are many cachers who find them frustrating, who don't know where to start to solve them, and who in some cases choose to ignore them. The thing is, there are times when puzzles are worth solving: that smiley always looks better than a question mark on your main screen, they can occupy your time on a very cold winter's night, they can help you get tougher difficulty spots filled on your difficulty and terrain grid (and there are times, like winter, when that can be a better option than looking for a tiny micro hidden in a tricky spot), and they can be really fun once you've tackled a few.
What makes geocaching puzzles unique is that they all have certain thing in common: somewhere, somehow, the end of the puzzle will be figuring out the final cache's location coordinates. Simple as that! Some puzzles will have a single, straightforward step that will let you figure those coordinates out, while others will either have multiple steps or a more difficult type of puzzle needing to be solved. In general, the difficulty rating on a puzzle will tell you what you are possibly getting into: if you're looking at a dififculty 4 or 5 puzzle, it will need either more thought, or more time, or potentially both, to solve.
Many of us that solve have puzzle buddies, as two brains can be better than one and if one person is great at solving some types of puzzles, the buddy may be better at other types.
There are four tutorial puzzles in my short series within the YRGC Geofest train art and this is the first. As such, it features one of the most straight-forward types of puzzles, a cipher. Ciphers have been used for centuries to hide information and have grown more complex over time. One such cipher, a simpler one that could be worked out with pen and paper, is called a "rail fence". Puzzles won't tell you what cipher the information is encoded with--most of the time--and if I wasn't telling you the ways to figure it out are to check the hint to see if I've left one and, if I haven't said there either, check the description for more subtle ones. You can also see if the title helps. If you think there might be a hint try a simple search online for what you think you have plus words like 'decode' and 'cipher' to see what comes up. A lot of times, even if you are just guessing an online search can reveal what you need. If I had not said directly that this was a "rail fence" and I also did not provide you with any hints at all (to increase the difficulty level on my puzzle) one thing to try is a general search for ciphers and then something that characterizes what you are looking at: for example, my rail fence cipher has the letters grouped into blocks of five and searching for something that specifies that can eliminate many ciphers that would not be relevant.
Here is the puzzle:
NTOTE IZOCA NNHES ESEIT EIEMS ENNOH UHEVE DILEE RWTRE NNHEX CAENE ERFRR FEREM OOTEE ZOVNE RSDIL VOOY
What the rail fence cipher has done is taken the coordinate words I have given it and made a grid: instead of writing the words across the page, it writes the words vertically, like you might do if you were literally standing in front of a fence trying to leave a secret message for somebody. The important bit: to know how many rails in the fence I have used for my message.
Let's say I had a shorter message, "this is my message", and I used 3 rails to write it. The rail fence cipher would rearrange it like this:
T S M E A
H I Y S G
I S M S E
It then encodes the message by writing the blocks out, starting with the top one: TSMEA HIYSG ISMSE
So, the choice is now yours: do you want to decode the final coordinates using pen and paper? Or, if you wish, give an online tool a try. I used http://www.braingle.com/brainteasers/codes/index.php to encode my message and you can use it to decode (the link is to the main ciphers and codes page so you can explore other types of ciphers should you wish to).
When you think you have this puzzle solved, you can click on the Geochecker below. This is a handy website that lets cache owners provide solvers with a quick way to check their answer.
You can check your answers for this puzzle on GeoChecker.com.
This geocache was placed under direct supervision of park staff. Please use the provided trails and visit this geocache only during park hours.