CUS 103: Cache Page Stenography Mystery Cache

This cache is NOT at the posted coordinates,

solve the puzzle below to find the corrected coordinates.

See Cryptogram University Series 101 CUS 101: Cryptogram Basics for more information on cryptography and this cache series.

CUS 103: Cache Page Stenography will teach you about how some simple stenography can be used to hide the final coordinates in plain sight on the web page or hidden in the contents of web pages.  As you may remember from CUS 101, Steganography is a subset of cryptography where information is hidden to avoid detection rather than encrypted.

Waypoints

The most obvious place to check for hidden coordinates is in the Waypoints.  I’ve seen a few caches where the final coordinates are literally listed in the waypoints.  You just have to look for it.

Logs

Coordinates or clues to coordinates can also be posted in the logs by the cache owner (CO).  Even if the CO didn’t post the coordinates or clues in a log, there are frequently clues to solving puzzles and the location of the cache in finders’ logs.

“Invisible Ink”  North 47deg 38point938  West 122deg 20point887

Invisible ink is one of the core steganography techniques.  With cache pages, you can hide anything, including coordinates, by just changing the font color to white for the text you want to hide in the cache description to blend in with the background.  Online you can just highlight all of the text in the cache description and the white text will appear.  You can also see hidden text by looking at the cache page HTML source code…more on that later…

Inventory

The Inventory on a cache page is where the Trackables that are in that cache are listed.  Each trackable has its own cache page that you can access by clicking on each trackable listed in the Inventory section.  Sometimes coordinates will be hidden in the cache page of a trackable that is listed in that cache.  Sometimes the cache container is that trackable and so contains additional information about the cache.

Cache Page HTML Source Code

Every website is written in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), which is the coding language used for web design.  Geocaching.com is no different, so every cache page is written in HTML code that turns into what you see when you pull up the cache page.  The challenge is accessing that HTML source code.  It’s really not difficult, but can seem challenging to someone who’s never done it before.  Because the way you access HTML source code varies depending on what web browser you use on your computer (Internet Explorer, Edge, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.), the best thing to do is just Google “how can you see HTML source code” and it will pull up websites that can guide you through it for your web browser.  For most web browsers, when you open the HTML source code, it will split your window showing the cache page on one half and showing the HTML source code on the other half.

A lot of the HTML source code will look like gibberish, but HTML source code uses markers (the greater than and less than signs “<” and “>”) to cue the webpage to do certain things.  Any CO input text will have <p> at the beginning and </p> at the end, for the cache description, etc.  However, this is only for the text the CO wants to be visible on the cache page.  Any text the CO adds to the cache page without those markers just won’t show up on the cache page when you view it, and can only be seen when you view the HTML source code.

The CUS 103 Exam:

Find the correct final coordinates.  I’m sure I left them among all these coordinates somewhere…