Anchorage has a wonderful tradition of allowing residents to establish memorials within park boundaries. These memorials can be as simple as a bench or as elaborate as rock gardens and giant iron sculpture.
This is the second cache in the Coastal Trail Memorial Series and speaking of giant iron sculptures:
The Iron Worker's Memorial
The first stage of the cache is at the memorial itself. A fabulous three steel arch sculpture fronted by a lovely garden, benches and two plaques. The first plaque is an ode to love and to the love that "Ken" (the iron worker) and his wife, and children shared. It will break your heart. Here's an excerpt:
Ken was an iron worker. On June 30, 1998, Ken went to work. His last words to me were, "Good-bye Sweetie Pie. I love you." Ken was killed that day at work. Because of our pact, our children and I will never have to say, "If only."
The second plaque is a poem by Bronwyn Haynes, "The Dumb Iron Worker". The memorial is one of my all time favorites - it's striking, beautiful, raw, powerful, and truly filled with love.
Unfortunately, I couldn't place the cache at the actual memorial for two reasons:
- I couldn't find a good spot to effectively hide a small cache.
- It's too close to the very cute Scobey cache, Super Sized.
So, the cache was placed elsewhere at a typical scenic coastal trail location.
There are two ways to find the cache:
1. If you have a magical device that tells you how far you are from the published coordinates, you can travel the Coastal Trail northwest, over the bridge and under the railroad tracks, until you are 624 feet away from the sign.
2. Or you can derive the coordinates to the cache location. The formula is as follows:
Coordinates: N 61° 12.ABC W 149° 55.DEF
- Where A = number of words in first line of Dumb Iron Worker.
- Where B = 1
- Where C = number of words in the second line of the third stanza of Dumb Iron Worker.
- Where D=Number of words in the last line of the second stanza of Dumb Iron Worker.
- Where E=D * 2
- Where F=Number of stanzas in the Dumb Iron Worker + 1.
You can check your answers for this puzzle on Geochecker.com.
The cache itself is smallish. But it does have room for a few trading items. The cache is also another one of these hidden almost-in-plain-sight jobs. So, please return the cache in exactly the same location and position as you found it. And please help camo the cache. For some reason this second version of the cache seems to be more obvious looking than the original cache container.
Good Luck!!!!!!
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