It isn't often that I break character as the webmaster of this site, and my stolen persona of Joe Medallion and write as myself, but since there's a wide variety of opinions on the subject, and I'm not presuming to speak for the Cooler Crew, for this I am breaking character.

There's no doubt that this year's hunt was a quickie. Not the quickest hunt for sure, but going 5 clues leaves your head scratching as to where you went wrong and how the guy who found it got there so fast. Going five clues with Snail Lake, a park that's never been used before, leaves you scratching your head even more. The irony of the combination of finder and park isn't lost on me. In fact, I gave Steve a hard time about putting all that effort into writing the Treasure Hunter's Guide, covering most of the parks in Saint Paul, only to have all that work be for naught because his find was outside the city.

Now because the find was so fast, there's a lot of conspiracy theorists out there and that's to be expected but people, you don't have to be jerks in order to have theories. But jerks we have. And I've seen an awful lot of comments like "why do the same group of people keep finding the thing" and "I'm tired of seeing these guys' names in the paper about this". I'd like to know where people come up with that. This year was the first time Steve found it. I hope he writes the extended Ramsey County edition of the guide. I really do. I'll buy one. Maybe more. And when I do you can bet money that I'll have him sign them, just like my other copies are. Then there are Jake and Rob. Their names have shown up a time or two over the course of the hunt, and they are the names people have got to be talking about. I have to wonder if people said the same thing about the Longin family in 1959 and 1961. Maybe Peggy Fritzke and Iola Mossbrugger caught flack in 1972 after finding 1966's medallion. Let's not forget about Kirk Condie's finds in 1984 and 1992. Probably, but we'll never know about it because there was no internet back then.

Let's have a bit of a look at the three names that people are talking about now:

• Steve Worthman: Prior to the 2015 hunt, Steve appears in four stories that we have copies of here on the site. These were in 1998, 1999, 2005, and 2009. Why? Because like I said earlier he wrote the book on the parks in Saint Paul. He's done his homework. If anyone deserves to find this thing, its Steve. Finally, this year, he did.
• Rob Brass: Rob's name appears in a few more stories, and only in regard to his find in 2010, and the tip that led Jake to the medallion in 2007. There's a bit on him right before the 2008 hunt in a story about he and Jake trying to get a back to back in 2008.
• Jake Ingebrigtson: Jake's name appears more than the others here. That's not surprising. He's also one of the most vocal pushers that Ma Press has for the hunt. And he probably has most of this site committed to memory, and then some. Jake's life revolves around this hunt, so much so that he wouldn't accept a job that wouldn't allow him to participate. You'll find that quote somewhere in this here site.

The last time we heard any of these names connected with the hunt was with the non-find in 2012. Since people won't ever be convinced of anything, I'm not going to discuss the matter here. Contrary to popular belief their names aren't always mentioned in connection with the hunt. Believe it or not, the press has actually interviewed other people as well. Jay Kuehn has been searching for the entire time the hunt has been going on; she was interviewed by the PP this year. Jake's and Rob's names haven't even come up in the media since the 2012 hunt.

So where does the hate come from? Beats me, but its totally unnecessary. I imagine a lot of it stems from the pseudo-anonymity of the internet. One can post something and bask in the fact that unless they've made themselves known to the group of people to whom they are speaking, one is anonymous, except for in the server logs of the website in use.

But let me say this to the questioning masses out there. There are very few, if any, people out there that I can say deserve this more than these guys do. Not because of a sense of entitlement, but because they've worked their tails off for it. Jake has pretty much dedicated his whole life to the hunt. Rob almost has. Steve spent years researching the parks in Saint Paul, writing and updating his beloved treasure hunter's guide. To those who say that their presence in the hunt is detracting from the family aspect of the hunt, Jake and Rob are bringing their kids into the hunt as soon as they reasonably can, creating the next generation of treasure hunters, just as those of us with older kids have done before them.

Someone on one of the boards somewhere noted that Steve started looking this year the day before the hunt started, and wondered how you can do that. Its really easy. He got in his car and started driving to parks. Its called scouting. Professional sports teams aren't put on the spot making their picks on draft day; they go scouting. They're evaluating potential players for skills they're looking for and whether the player would be a good fit for a team. In the hunt,,scouting involves checking out park conditions; things like snow cover and recent changes are at the top of the list. Apart from the times it was found by a spontaneous hunter, I'd bet a lot of finders in the last couple of decades have spent a lot of time doing just that. And we know Steve's been "scouting" for nearly 20 years.

For a good deal of us, this treasure hunt is a passion. Look at this site. When it started out in 1998, it existed solely because of the Pioneer Press hunt. We've greatly expanded our scope since then. Today, in addition to clues for mock hunts, this site collects clues on at least 45 different local hunts around the Twin Cities and in greater Minnesota and Western Wisconsin. And people in this group have found several of them. Just look at the Hall of Fame: 28 finds. And all the information we can gather is right here. Available for free for anyone who wants to check it out. That information will always be freely available. What's not free is the discussion board site that the Cooler Crew uses. It's at a site called ableminds, a site which hosts many more discussion groups than just the Cooler Crew. They are the ones that charge a fee to post. As a group we have decided to allow access, even read-only access, only to those people who have chosen to support the site we post at, because page views aren't free. At some point in the near future we hope to have our discussion boards integrated into this site. At that point, I may set up a donation portal because I'll have to move the site into the cloud from my basement, but the content here will still be available gratis. How we'll handle the discussion boards is a question that will be answered at that time.

I don't know how may times I've said it in the past, nor do I know how many more times I'll say it in the future, but for a not insignificant number of people in the Cooler Crew, the treasure of friendship outweighs the treasure of the medallion. Maybe its easy for me to say that since I've never found the thing. But I know several people who have said that exact same thing or something similar.

The Pioneer Press this year ran an article on balancing camaraderie and competition during the hunt. Apart from the professor at the U and a former PP staff writer, the only people quoted in the article are Cooler Crew. I can only speculate that the reason for this is that no one else answered the open call for comments. When you read that article, you learn that while the Cooler Crew is all about the hunt, we're about a lot more than just the hunt. It should come as no surprise that if and when one of us finds the treasure, more of us are nearby when it happens. Why? Because coming full-circle, the greatest treasure a lot of us have found has been a good number of friendships that exist far longer than a mere 12 days a year. And because they exist for more than just 12 days a year, we're bound to be even tighter during those 12 days a year.

With that, I'm gonna go put my webmaster hat back on. Joe Medallion has a few features to add to the site before next year's hunt.

Ode to Hunt

The hunt is over and I guess, 
I’ll clean my house, for it’s a mess. 
Through sleet and snow and low wind chill, 
We’re like mailmen but mentally ill. 

It ended Monday, blessed is he, 
To find a puck that looks like pee. 
I must admit the kid has class, 
Has anyone seen my frozen ass? 

At Como Park the hunt was bold, 
The polar bears said, “Damn its cold!” 
Hid was treasure for us to find, 
Some looked up a frog’s behind. 

Braving the cold takes lots of guts: 
I’m getting the feeling back in my nuts. 
The wife was great throughout the hunt, 
But now she has a frozen c….offee. 

So now it’s over what to do: 
Re-hash with the Cooler Crew, 
We’ll whine with wine and jeer with beer, 
And say, “I guess it’s mine NEXT year.” 

I supposed that with the hunt starting in under a week that its time, once again, to put together a list of treasure hunting tips. I've done this for the past couple of years now, and stopping just wouldn't be right. Compared to those two years, I'm a little late, but what the heck, right?

Buttons. Buy a button and get it registered. They've been available for over a month now, and have to be registered by January 17 at midnight in order to qualify you for the extra $5000 in cash if you find the puck. Who wants to throw away 5 grand? Not me. Don't count on your hunting buddies to have one, because once again there will be only one finder and one check. If your group's finder (probably the person with the lowest tax bracket) doesn't have a registered button, you're out 5 grand. No questions asked. I know I sound like a broken record, including this tip every year, but its sad to see the number of winners who just didn't do it and missed out on a bigger prize. The hunt that inspired the "only one finder rule" in 2012 was the most recent encounter. Already have a button? Well, if you're reading this, you've got an internet connection so go find the card and follow the web site link. There are no excuses.

Be prepared. This can be taken many ways. One of them is right above this paragraph. Others include keeping your hunting gear in your vehicle. Whether this is your boots, ski pants, shovel, rake, maps, guide books, hat, scarf, etc. Keep it with you. I always look like a dork when I'm out in a park in two feet of snow wearing nothing but my tennis shoes, and so does everyone else who does the same thing. Not only does it look bad but tennis shoes make for lousy traction in the snow bank, which creates a dangerous situation. "I don't go out digging during the day so I keep that stuff in my 'hunting car'" you might say. So does everyone else, but I tell ya, when that light bulb comes on, and you get the urge to go hunt, you will go hunt and nothing's going to stop it.

Get out and hunt. Yes, I say this one almost every year too but its true. There are a lot of armchair hunters out there who live vicariously through the online message boards. Many of those people don't actually expect to find the medallion, or are physically unable to search, and being online is their "fix", and that's OK. But if you really really want to find the puck bring home the glory, you're going to have to go out and look. When I was a kid, my parents figured out the torpedo clue in the 1990 hunt at Como. We even got in the car to drive by the place. No one actually thought to get out of the car and go searching for the $4,000 that was laying in a clump of grass and clay in that snowbank. That was a Tuesday evening in a time when the hunt ran from Sunday to the following Saturday with two clues per day. Had we looked, we could have found ourselves among the list of quickest finds ever. Alas we didn't and even though I didn't have a say in the matter, I do have myself on the wall of shame for that one.

Follow your heart (and your brain). This is related to the last one. If you have a brilliant explanation for a clue, don't cast it aside. Investigate everything. You might not be right. But then again, you might. Knowing that in the end, there can be only one, there is some pride in being able to say afterwards that you correctly figured out a clue. At the same time, follow your brain too. If your idea for a single clue pinpoints one park and you can't make any of the others fit there, chances are you're not at the right park. Look at the 2003 hunt in Como, for instance. Even though many many hunters felt a pull to Harriet Island, there were certain things you just couldn't match up there no matter how hard you tried, such as "wide as triple e". Perhaps that's part of the reason the hunt lasted as long as it did. Everyone was in the wrong park.

Mingle.  Every year the Cooler Crew organizes a Pre-Dig Gig and a Rehash Bash. The Pre-Dig is always the Saturday night before the hunt starts. This year its at Joseph's on Wabasha Street. It's an open event and provides a great way to meet fellow hunters. The Rehash is a potluck picnic usually (but not always) held the Sunday after the Winter Carnival is over (yes, it is also almost always on Super Bowl Sunday), so you need to pay attention to this site to know when that happens. But there's more than just those two events. One, there's always mingling in the parks. Two, there's usually a gathering of hunters every night before the clue comes out. We're expecting that to be at Gabe's once again, but who knows. 

Once again, there can be only one finder. And hunting alone is no fun anyway. A good many hunters will tell you that despite not having found the puck, the friendships they've formed over the years are of far greater value than finding the medallion. WCCO-TV even did a story about it with the Cooler Crew a couple of years ago.

Have fun. 'Nuff said.

Every year, I try to make at least one improvement behind the scenes to the Cooler Crew site. Over this past year, we've added in as many of the small-town treasure hunts as we could get our hands on into the site. This has involved a lot of googling and other tracking down of articles from smaller newspapers, contact with the folks who run the various hunts, etc. As of right now, we have 633 distinct pieces of content on the site, dating back to some of the original writings of Greg Sax back in 1999, and including all of the hunts we know of that took place in 2013. I hope to keep that particular tradition up. I'm also in the process of trying to make the url names of each of the individual pages more consistent, something along the lines of content_type/source/year/name. 

On the back end of things, I'm tweaking the code that powers the treasure hunt section of the site. One of the more prominent things you'll notice is the addition of a Google Map to the hunt information section of the treasure hunt pages where we have GPS coordinates for the location of that particular treasure hunt. On that same note, I'm working to change the way the summary maps work on the site. As of right now, the summary map pages, e.g., the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt map are relatively static. Yes, they update based on hunts being added, but the underlying database structure isn't very conducive to maintenance, and all of the boundary data for cities, and hunt location data are sent to you, regardless of whether they're visible in the map you're looking at or not. I'm working to change that.

Finally, I'm actually working on a replacement for our forum. I think its kind of obvious that with Facebook, there are a lot of people who can't justify the $10 per year to maintain their membership at Able Minds. The last post in the Cooler Crew boards at the time I write this took place on September 25, nearly three months ago. A while ago, I started a conversation with many of you on Facebook just as a brainstorming place. I got a lot of good ideas from that. While I can guarantee that there won't be a forum hosted on coolercrew.com for the 2014 hunt, I'd really like to have something in place for the 2015 hunt. Don't be surprised if you see invites from me to test out a development site sometime over the summer. As for the history at Able Minds, well, you know we've got our boards from 1998-2005 archived here. I'm working to get the Ableminds content archived here too (as well as to keep it updated as people post). 

Oh and don't forget, with an account, you can create content here too. At the moment that's the only reason you need an account. As a result, accounts can now only be administratively created. When the forum comes online, you'll need an account for that as well. Until then, if you don't have an account, and would like one, follow the contact us link below and we'll set you up. We've done a major purge of "inactive" accounts, so if you had one before, or even thought you had one before, you might not now. Once the forum is back online, account creation will be re-enabled.

We've reached the halfway point of the summer hunting season. The Cooler Crew has picked up a pair of medallions. Coldest Hunter snagged Roseville, and Matt Koskie grabbed Cottage Grove. Way to go guys! Nine hunts are down, and not all of them without controversy. Columbia Heights had the brick-breaking problem to ultimately get to the medallion in Judge Wargo Court. The Blaine hunt lasted only a single clue which was taken down from the web site before any of us knew what it was. C'est la vie though, right?

The good news is that there are still a lot more hunts out there for us to get. So crew, lets get out there and find them!

With the release of the first three clues for the 2013 Hugo Good Neighbor Days Search For Spike, the 2013 hunting season is officially under way. Having found six of the summer festival medallions last year, and being more organized and determined this year, we are in a position to capture even more festival treasure this summer. At this time, we know of 14 cities having treasure hunts this summer with prizes ranging from $100 to $1500 depending on the hunt. To help keep tabs on the hunts, we've added a block to the right hand side of this page called "Today's Events" which shows whatever events are in our site calendar that are going on today.

Let's go Cooler Crew and capture some treasure!

What a way to close out a milestone year for the Cooler Crew! Coincidence or not, after a slew of red herrings from the clue writer, we ended up digging back in the birthplace of the Crew -- well, the in-person birthplace of the Crew anyway -- Cherokee Heights Park. Of course things have changed since those early days. After two weeks out in the frozen tundra, we've decided to wimp out for the rehash, and nowdays have it indoors, typically in the shelter at Newell Park, and this year was no different.

Just as with the Predig, we met a lot of new friends, and welcomed back some old ones. After a years-long hiatus, KT returned and assumed co-MC responsibilities with Redbear. Those two just make a great comedic team when it comes to justifying which door prizes go to which winner. This year's door prizes were rounded out with plenty of PP swag, rightfully "acquired"  from the press conference and winner's party at Gabe's (and from the Vulcan Victory Dance the night before), along with the requisite clue-related prizes: a copy of Joel Barker's Paradigm book, plenty of Vinyl from the band "Head East" and Bing Crosby, and DVDs of the "movie" Mashed Rice, er, Archimedes, and crazy food items like Yellow Mashed Rice, Morton Salt, and Little Debbie Honey Buns.

Since, of course, this Crew knows how to eat, and no Rehash would be complete without a smorgasbord of yummy food, there was also a healthy dose of clue-related food, all of which was served at the aptly-named "Generally East Buffet". Red herring abounded, from actual picked herrign with red food color added, to Swedish-"herring" infused red Jell-O cups, "bluff"alo wings, Jumble-aya, "Barked Fences", and Me2's, Jake's, and BFG's "I'll eat my right nut" meatballs and "I'll drink my own pee" Lemon bars (you had to be on Facebook to understand where that came from). Let's not forget the absolutely beautiful cake Blackmamba decorated to look like the part of Cherokee Park the medallion was discovered in.

As has been customary, the finders joined us, a really sweet couple those two are, and were presented the annual Golden Pick award, and Cluey handed out the prizes to the winners of the Park Pick Pool, Redbear and the combination of Jake and Leelabell (whose prize was accepted on their behalf by Art Vandelay).

All in all, it was a great close to a decade and a half of the Cooler Crew, and a week and a half of hunting on the tundra. We're looking forward to an even better second fifteen years, and lots more weeks and a half worth of hunts. But if you really haven't got enough of a hunting fix, stay tuned for AW's mock hunt which will be starting just around the corner!

The 2013 Predig Gig was arguably one of the best we've had to date. With over 60 people in the group shot here, we probably had somewhere around 150 people come through the doors over the course of the evening. We had the entire banquet room at Joseph's Grill on Wabasha, plus as the room cleared out, we had a huge portion of the dining room. As always we welcomed back old friends and welcomed in new friends!

Joseph's provided their $15.00 pasta bar: all you can eat pasta, cooked up to order with whatever veggies, meat, pasta, and sauce you wanted. Great food for a great deal! The plate is sure a lot bigger than it looks when you're making your selections for sure. After people ate in the banquet room, the tables were rolled up and the lights dimmed as the room became a dance floor. For people preferring conversation, the dining room was available and coolerheads mingled back and forth between the two.

Mom provided the annual Cooler Crew button, while Lil'man's son provided the DJ services for the evening. Clue Master organized the two park pick pool boards, each worth $125. Thanks go to Allison Wonderland for organizing the whole event! Everyone is looking forward to reprising the location next year!

Follow the hunt on our 2013 treasure hunt page.