*** I will have to remove this cache in 2012 because the statue
will be removed! Hurry up! **** Montrealers, and particularly
residents of the Plateau Mont-Royal, like to be in the middle of
where the action is. This cache is a virtual multi-cache that
illustrates some of the highlights of Montreal’s urban
landscape in a thought experiment that revolves around Parc
Lafontaine, in the heart of the Plateau.
A geocacher who remembers what ellipses are should be able to
figure this one out, especially if you take a refresher course on
the Internet, however, it requires some thinking.
First, go to WP1: N45°31.596 W073°34.224 You can park in the
dead end street. Close to these coordinates, you will find the
remains of an old tree stump, with a new tree emerging next to it.
We will call WP1 the centre of the world.
You have to mentally transport yourself back in time, on
December 31st 1999, at the location described in Ice Tea Y2K+1 by
its author, Don Buchan (see nearby caches). I am reproducing these
coordinates here for convenience, but you don’t really have
to go there:
N 45° 30.463 W 073° 36.263 (WP2).
The following step is hard to imagine, but bear with me. It is
nearly midnight, and as year 2000 comes in, imagine Don taking a
jump, from the top of the mountain, and falling into a slow orbit
that will make him circle over le Plateau in a flat plane around
the centre of the world. The only gravity pulling him around is
from the centre of the world. Earth gravity, or wind, do not apply
in this simulation. We will also ignore elevation considerations.
Just a flat ellipse, as seen from above, that will allow him to fly
over interesting features of Montreal, following conventional
gravity laws (no relativity needed here, given the leisurely pace
of the orbiting body). Since this is the first cache I publish, I
had to involve Don, who made me discover my first caches...
Back to Lafontaine Park, where you need to collect a couple of
clues. With the centre of the world as your WP1, set your GPS to
tell you the distance in meters and your (true) bearing from WP1 to
where you stand. The Etrex does this when Bearing is selected at
the bottom of the Pointer Page... Walk away from the waypoint,
towards the statue of Felix Leclerc until your GPS indicates: 32m @
266 degrees. Felix Leclerc was central to a whole generation and
made Quebec known in France though his songs. Find out on what day
in October 1990 this statue was erected. This number is clue
#1.
Continue walking in that general direction until your GPS
indicates that you are 225m away from WP1, at a bearing of 243
degrees. This other statue describes an event that happened around
Montreal nearly 340 years before Don’s flight, when people
were still fighting for this new world. Find out the month this
event happened. This is clue #2.
If you brought your kids you can walk to the two playground
sections and you can also bring your dog to an area dedicated for
dogs, at the other end of the park. Enjoy the place while you can,
because soon serious thinking will be in order.
Ready? With clue #1 and #2 in hand, you now have the date
(day/month) at which our orbiting Don has reached his maximum
distance away from WP1. This an important parameter to know when
talking about ellipses. Coincidentally, he also touched the top of
the tallest leaning structure in the world at noon, on that date. I
am not talking about the tower in Pisa... I am talking about a
place that millions were watching on television in 1976, when a
young Romanian star astonished the world.
You are now in a position to know Don’s flight path until
he landed back on his departure location and stopped his single
orbit. By the way, he completed this urban ellipse in less time
than an earth orbit around the sun. You can also verify that he
hovered over one of the islands where I visited the Man and his
World exposition in 1967. I was on top of the world at age 12, back
then.... He also passed several hundred meters away from another of
his caches (Ice Tea 10) and from the Gilles Villeneuve circuit,
that regularly attracts an international crowd of F1 fans, every
spring.
Now, to solve this puzzle, you need to find out what illustrious
man he flew above during the night of October 9 to 10, 2000. Once
you find it, it will be obvious, but make sure to confirm it by
entering the exact spelling of the name on the statue in the
certificate supplied below (do not use CAPS letters). You can then
post your ‘found it’ message on the web, so that I can
track how popular (or difficult) this cache is. You may also want
to email me what method you used to find the answer, as there are
many, with different levels of precision. The cache itself can be
found easily as it sits in an open place. Please, don’t post
the answer on the site.