This puzzle is inspired by a hint that I've occasionally seen while geocaching. If you solve the puzzle, you'll get the hint. Otherwise, you might have to wait until September 15th to see the hint.
Special Notes about the 2016 Puzzle Challenge: To be considered for Fastest Solver points, you must verify your solution with Certitude. Finders will receive Top Finder points when submitting Found It logs to the cache page. All "point" scoring is arbitrary, subject to change, at the discretion of the cache owner, and probably completely meaningless (unless you just want to be announced sooner at the celebration party, expected to be December 11th, and even that might not happen in the right order). The real challenge is just to see whether you can solve all of these caches by the end of the year. To maintain fairness, hints should not be offered by the cache owner or other solvers until the fifteenth of the month.
Special Notes about this month's cache: Rather than publish this at midnight and putting the FTF hounds into a dilemma about whether or not to search in the dark, I decided to publish this at 7 am this time. I wanted to hide this one further off the trail, but there's a lot of poison oak out there; so this is definitely in view of the muggles. Hope it lasts.
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.