Note: Cache moved 29 Nov 2025. I've kept the puzzle the same, so no need to resolve it. But now the puzzle solution is different from the final location.
Enter the puzzle solution into Certitude. If correct, it will say "sorry" and show the coordinates in orange text. Then it will give you the final coordinates. Putting THOSE coordinates in Certitude will tell you that you are correct!
This is one of the ways cache owners can deal with the situation of having moved a cache. I prefer doing this to requiring you to re-solve the puzzle, or contact me for the new solution.
The other day I was talking to a cacher about puzzle caches. There were lots around where he lives, and he had “no idea where to start”. Whilst there are all sorts of puzzles I tried to explain some general principles to him. That gave me the idea for this cache. I know there are other caches that teach you about puzzles, though I’ve not seen many like this which combine many techniques.
The idea of this cache is to provide an introduction to solving (and creating) puzzle caches. I can’t cover all techniques, and experienced puzzle solvers/setters may find this trivial or even patronizing. If that is the case I apologise – but it will at least be an easy solve for you.
Caches are hidden at GPS coordinates. So at the end of the day, you need to come up with numbers. Often these numbers come directly from the puzzle, which will be the case for most of this puzzle. Sometimes rather than numbers you need a keyword to put into a checker like “Certitude”, but we won’t be doing that here.
Our coordinates look like this:
N AB CD.EFG W HJK LM.NPQ
So in this puzzle, we are going to find the 15 digits in the coordinates. Note that alternate coordinate formats can be used, but we won’t cover that today.
Now, the first thing to note is with the exception of some very old puzzle caches (before the guidelines were changed), the actual cache coordinates must be within 2 miles of the posted coordinates. Knowing this, some of the numbers you already know without reading more. But in this puzzle, I will show you techniques to obtain each digit, even the obvious ones you already know. If you just want to solve this puzzle you can take some shortcuts and skip some steps - but if you are new to puzzles, following each step may teach you something you can use in the future. I will also note that I have at least one puzzle where your task is to find coordinates that are thousands of miles away from the cache location! In these puzzles, entering the far away coordinates in the "Certitude" checker gives you the real final coordinates - and those real coordinates are within 2 miles of the posted coordinates (making it a legal puzzle). But I'm not doing that here.
Most puzzles use some or all of these general techniques:
- Hiding information
- A theme or way to connect pieces of information
- Playing some sort of game – a jigsaw, sudoku etc.
- A way of converting information to numbers
Because 2 of these stages require you to download something from a site other than Geocaching.com I need to make the following statement. One file is an image, the other an audio clip.
Alert: You are about to access or download a file that contains further details needed to find this geocache. As the cache owner, I represent that this file is safe to download although it has not been checked by Groundspeak or by the reviewer for possible malicious content. Download this file at your own risk.
One last comment: In explaining techniques throughout this description, when I talk about "X" I am giving an example. For the puzzle, you need to find the values of ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQ - not any example "X".
An easy way to hide information is for the owner to use white text. When displayed on the standard white background, you can’t see it. Depending on which “app” you use, you may or may not be able to see it. When using a web browser on a computer, you need to “select all”. There are different ways to do this, you can click and hold your left mouse button and drag over all the text. Or you can press ctrl-a (the “ctrl” and “a” keys at the same time).
A=5
Another common technique is to hide information in the html “source” of the cache page. Access to this depends on the browser used, but on both Chrome and Edge which I use, you right click and choose “view page source”. There are a few places information can be hidden, but most commonly you will find it in one of the sections starting with “UserSuppliedContent”, and often as a comment which will look like this:
<!-- Here is a hint -->
Cache owners can also hide information in images. Sometimes it is in plain sight in the image, but perhaps very small or faint, so hard to see. Sometimes image editing tools are required to change the contrast or colours so you can see it. Another way is to hide the coordinates in information about an image known as EXIF.
It is possible to hide information in an image that is hosted on geocaching.com, but often puzzles with hidden information are stored on external sites. The reason for this is images on geocaching.com are reformatted, which loses some of the EXIF information. I've also found that this reformatting can change the colours somewhat. It can also change the size/resolution of the image, making it harder to zoom way in to see the hidden text. Currently, images stored on geocaching.com have a URL starting with https://s3.amazonaws.com/gs-geo-images. If the image is stored on a different site there is a good chance that information is hidden within. Though it could just be that the cache owner prefers hosting images on a different site.
Here is a link to an image:
Image of Fenway Park
The information is in plain sight, just to the right of the Fenway Park sign, high above home plate. What I've done is make the colour of the added information very close to the colour of the background, but not exact. As I told you where to look, if you look carefully you may be able to read the hidden information without altering the image. But if you want to see it more clearly (and learn a technique), download the free software Gimp. Download the image I linked above and load that into Gimp. Edit the contrast to 115 as shown below. You should now see the information more clearly. (You can't see it below as it is behind the window).
Sometimes the information isn’t hidden at all, you just need to figure out how to turn it into numbers. For instance, if I were to say, “Hells Bells, you are on track to find the value of X”, you might correctly conclude I am referring to the AC/DC song, and as “Hells Bells” is the first track on the “Back in Black” album, X=1. Oh, excuse me a moment, I’ve Given the Dog a Bone (D).
A common technique you will find on a lot of my puzzles is what I call “find the theme, get the numbers”. For example, if I tell you that X=Black, that’s not very clear. Is it 5 because Black has 5 letters? Is it 8 because the 8-ball in pool is black? Or is it 7, because Back in Black is the seventh studio album by Australian rock band AC/DC? Without an additional hint to understand the theme, this isn’t a very good clue. But if I say I can’t resist telling you that X=Black, you may figure out I’m talking about resistor codes. That is just an example, you need the value of E, not X. Don't forget what you have already been taught.
https://www.geocachingtoolbox.com/index.php?lang=en&page=resistorCode
E=Red
Sometimes you need to make the connection between a list of things. If I give you these names: John, Richard, George. And from these you need to figure out the value of X. Without any hint to the theme, this is another bad “what am I thinking” clue. You might notice that these are all names of kings, you could add up the total number of Johns, Richards, and Georges. That might seem logical and easy to me, but not to you as you don’t know what I’m thinking. If I add a hint that “I know the missing name like it was only Yesterday”, you should be able to figure out the theme and find the missing name. I can make it easier by telling you that Richard used a different name as his stage name. And F is equal to the number of letters in the missing (Christian) name + 1.
Let’s return to John, Richard, and George If I were to add these names to the list:
Joe, Donald, Barack
Then you should be able to figure out G=Andrew (the first one). Note that if you were to take the answer Modulo 10 (also known as Mod 10), the second Andrew gives the same result. The first Andrew had a pet parrot named "Poll" who he taught to swear. That is not useful information for this cache, but the idea might come in useful if you encounter other puzzles of mine. 
Information can be hidden in text. Consider the paragraph below.
Zenna is an
Extraordinary cacher and a
Really nice person
On her days off.
Instead of reading horizontally change your approach and you shall find the value of H.
Whilst it isn’t a rule, and not all puzzles use letters in a formula, where they are used often the letter “I” is skipped because it can be confused with “1”. So we will do that.
A relatively new and popular way of hiding coordinates in the text is using “What 3 Words”.
Consider this text:
I was out playing golf with my friend, Tiger. It was a battle, but in the end, Tiger won. I blame it on my having shorter limbs.
One tool you can use is here https://www.geocachingtoolbox.com/index.php?lang=en&page=w3w
Take the 13th digit of the coordinates, and that is your value of J.
Ciphers and codes are quite common in puzzles. One simple definition to distinguish: Codes substitute arbitrary symbols—typically, letters or numbers—for the components of the original message. Ciphers use algorithms to transform a message into an apparently random string of characters. Common codes include Morse code, Templar Code, and Pigpen (which is often called a cipher but is really a code). Common ciphers include Vigenère and Playfair.
Geocaching uses a very simple cipher called “Rotation 13” (ROT-13) to encode hints on the cache page. That cipher doesn’t use a key. More complex ciphers use a key, and it can be very difficult to crack them without identifying which cipher it is, and what is the key. A good puzzle will have some hints to lead you to the correct cipher and key – but they may be well hidden or cryptic themselves.
To figure out the value of K, decode the following cipher. I’ve mentioned the type of cipher already, and the key to solving it is baseball.
Xedp eoyp. Uhw zblfp pf C mt thz. Pf usvrdp zom ooeh eial eoyhlz, ak xie afazdi oepot tg ff wteiif 2 qjlpd pf llf pzduev gpocojnsxfs. Slqpq Gbcstog.
The Bacon “cipher” is an interesting one. It is not a true cipher, instead, it is a type of steganography. With the letter K cipher, it was pretty obvious this was some sort of cipher. With Bacon, it will read like normal text, but there will be two different fonts used. Learn about Bacon here http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/baconian.php
This will give you the needed number
Often you will see binary code (all zeros and ones). This can be a number of things. In the most simple case, it is a base 2 number. If I were to say X=1001, then X=9, as 9 is 1001 in base 2. The binary could be obfuscated, consider this clumsy attempt.
This is another way to give you the decimal number 9. Or indigestion.
If you see a long binary string, one option is ASCII text. “ASCII” is a standard way of encoding characters into binary used in computing. You can find ASCII tables on the web, and there are many online tools which can do it for you - this is one of them https://onlineasciitools.com/convert-binary-to-ascii
01010111 01100101 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110
01100101 00100001 00100000 00100000 01001001 01100110 00100000 01111001
01101111 01110101 00100000 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01110010
01100101 01100001 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011
00101100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101000 01100001
01110110 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110101 01100011 01100011 01100101
01110011 01110011 01100110 01110101 01101100 01101100 01111001 00100000
01100011 01101111 01101110 01110110 01100101 01110010 01110100 01100101
01100100 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001
00100000 01101001 01101110 01110100 01101111 00100000 01000001 01010011
01000011 01001001 01001001 00100000 01110100 01100101 01111000 01110100
00101110 00100000 00100000 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100011 01100001
01101110 00100000 01110100 01100101 01101100 01101100 00100000 01111001
01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000
01001101 00111101 00110010 00101110 00100000 00100000 00001010
Sometimes you need to figure out the theme, and then how to turn it into a number. Consider this:
I was wearing brown trousers and listening to my favourite song by “The Jam” on a local radio station when I traveled directly from Paddington to Oxford Circus.
Even if you don’t know The Jam or which song I like, if you google songs by The Jam and combine it with the other information, you should be able to determine the value of N. And I wasn’t in a Town Called Malice. Also, be sure to consider all the information. Generally, all information is provided for a reason. Why would I mention the colour of my trousers? In this specific case, this is just extra information to confirm what you have figured out already. If I was wearing red and green trousers (or even red and yellow) the answer could be different (though I would also have to remove the word "directly"). Get this right, or make this boy shout, make this boy scream.
Similar to the letter “I”, we will skip the letter “O”.
Often multiple aspects need to be combined. Consider this clue:
N 30 13.250 W 095 09.374
Look at this on a map. It seems a random housing development, approximately 40 miles from Houston, Texas. Look more closely at the name of the street. I’ll give you the shirt off my back if you can’t figure out the value of P. Ignore 1936 and go with the majority.
And for our last clue. Sometimes you need to download or watch/listen to an audio/video file. Coordinates could be given out as Morse code for example. Or it could be complex and require you to filter on a specific frequency range to hear the information. Or it could be as simple as listening to some music until you hear the information you need for Q. If you know the song you should get it in 3 notes! If not wait to the end of the clip and all will be clear.
Listen to this to get Q
Who nicked my pudding?
Sometimes a puzzle will use a purposely complex formula like this (which is a real example from an archived cached I have found)
N 51° 22.((J*(M+K))*(A*P))-((((N+H)+(B+(D+F)))+((E+D)*G))/(C-L))
W 002° 21.((C*(M*((H*N)+L)))+((D+((A*J)-((G+F)+P)))*E)*((K*Q)+B))
When provided with a formula, be sure to apply the order of operations, known as 'BODMAS', 'BIDMAS' or PEDMAS'. Though sometimes puzzle setter doesn't follow these rules themselves!
For this puzzle, no arithmetic is necessary. I already provided the formula earlier on this page.
Now check your answer, and go find the cache! Remember, If correct, it will say "sorry" and show the coordinates in orange text. Then it will give you the final coordinates. Putting THOSE coordinates in Certitude will tell you that you are correct!
You can validate your puzzle solution with
certitude.
The Adder is our only venomous snake, the shy adder can be spotted basking in the sunshine in woodland glades and on heathlands. You are very unlikely to come across one here, and I have never seen one. But it is possible as they can be found across the country, except for the Isles of Scilly, the Channel Islands, Northern Ireland, and the Isle of Man.