Rules for this puzzle: No intentional red herrings, no oddball (fishiness) methods of presenting coordinates (UTM, for example, or also having coordinates read backwards), and no leaving off the N32 and W97 just to make it more difficult. There may be more than one layer on this puzzle. Collaboration is allowed and you may ask me for hints after there has been a FTF.
I'm unashamedly against red herrings, or the use of misdirection, when creating a puzzle. Solving a puzzle is already challenging... I don't see the point in intentionally misleading someone. That being said, a LOT of puzzle hiders out there do use red herrings, and so, unfortunately, I must discuss it.
When working on a puzzle, if the solution seems obvious, but it simply isn't working out, then it is time to take a step back and reconsider what you might be looking at.
Some classic red herring examples I have seen are as follows:
- A checkerboard that ended up actually being an abacus.
- A puzzle about pizza... That ended up being a metaphor for Pi (3.14159). Pizza Pie, clever, right?
- Compasses pointing in certain directions ended up being clock faces.
- Clock faces that were actually semaphore flags.
This is probably also an important time to tell you about how puzzle creators use numbers. In order to make a puzzle less difficult to guess by logic (one flag looks like like another flag so they must be the same value), a CO might pick something that has 2-digit numbers... and then only use either the left or right most digit. This is also a good time to revisit something we discussed before... Why would the zero, nine, seven, three, and two be the flags in the pictures I present? How can you make those work out so that, ultimately, the rest of the puzzle flows properly?
Puzzle Solving Tools - If I don't discuss a particular tool below in the paragraphs above, you may assume I did not use it for this puzzle; however, it may be useful for puzzles of similar style.
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.
A NOTE TO PUZZLE COs: Now, in my opinion, when creating a puzzle with red herrings, it is important to try and provide some bread crumbs to help the solver on their way. As an example, I consider it cruel to create a puzzle where nothing, whatsoever, on the cache page will help you solve the puzzle. Instead, you end up finding the coordinates on another cache page of the CO, hidden in the background image. Don't do that... nobody likes that =). Instead, I think a CO's goal is to create a puzzle that can be solved as long as the solver applies logic to the information presented. Avoid, at all costs, creating a WIMP (what's in my pocket?) - or a puzzle that could have a million possibilities.