With apologies to George Gamow: A page apparently torn from an old diary was found under the floorboards of an abandoned house in the vicinity of Colorado Springs. Since the diary is missing, the only clue to a lost cache is the following:
“…With the posse hot on our trail, we knew we had to hide the loot. We hitched our horses at an old cabin and figured out a way to hide our plunder and be able to find it later when thing’s cooled down. We found a good spot and disguised and hid our take so it wouldn’t be found by anybody but us. Next, we hurried back to the cabin, and my cohort prepared a clue that had the coordinates of the cache. He designed the clue so that it would lead us back to the cache but would be meaningless to anybody that happened to stumble upon it. Meanwhile, I paced off the distance from the cabin’s north-facing front door to a nearby pile of rocks SE of the cabin, then turned ninety degrees to the right and paced off an equal number of steps and marked that point. I returned to the cabin’s front door and paced off the distance to a very large tree to the east, turned at a right angle to the left and paced off an equal number of steps to a second point. We hid the clue at the point midway between the two marked points…”
Legend has it that when the robbers returned to uncover their cache after serving lengthy terms in the state prison, they were incapable of locating the old cabin, as it had succumbed to the ravages of fire and time, and they were unable to find their booty. Locals had found the rocks and tree used as reference points by the two bandits and recorded the tree’s coordinates as N38 55.563 W104 51.510 and N38 55.519 W104 51.495 for the rocks. However, they also were unable to locate the cabin and the cache, but it is presumed the clue to the cache and the cache itself are still hidden somewhere in the area.
A calculator may be useful.
You can check your answers for this puzzle on Geochecker.com.
ADJUSTMENT TO SOLUTION: AFTER you get the checker to agree with your solution subtract 0.004 from the north coord and 0.005 from the west coord.