On third day of third year of hunting, they find medallion
Luis and Virginia Ibarra put their daughter on the school bus early Thursday, got in their car and drove to nearby Phalen Park to look for the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt medallion.
Shortly before 8 a.m., after looking for about 10 minutes, they found it.
Their short search, however, doesn't mean the Dayton's Bluff couple were just passers-by happening on the plastic disc that is worth $5,000 to them.
This was the third year they've taken part in the annual Winter Carnival hunt — and their third day searching this year.
The Ibarra family, which includes Margarita, 12 , Luis Angel, 13, and Vanessa, 17, worked together to decipher the daily clues and had been out looking on Saturday and Wednesday, following leads they pried out of the rhyming hints.
"We were looking along a bike trail (in Phalen Park) one day because a clue mentioned up and down,'' Luis Ibarra said in an interview. "Last year, we were looking around Xcel arena because a clue said you could see the Capitol, but (the medallion) was at Como.''
After spending a few hours searching Wednesday evening, the family came home "kind of sad, kind of cold" to put the children to bed for school.
Ibarra, 41, spent the evening pondering the "doughnut" clue. On Thursday, with a lot of others looking in the same general location, the couple followed the final clue's detailed description of the medallion's location in Phalen Park between Round Lake and Lake Phalen.
"It was just there, where a hill starts to rise. There was something shiny in the snow, and I popped it up with a stick I was using,'' Ibarra said
He said the medallion was not encased or enclosed in any other object, such as a can or box, as it traditionally has been. Hunt officials said the medallion originally had been encased in a doughnut with green frosting. Its clean condition when it was found, however, suggests that other treasure hunters had kicked the medallion loose as they dug through the snow or that an animal had happened upon it.
Ibarra, unsure he had the right object, asked a few people around him if he had found the actual medallion.
Among those onlookers was a television news crew from KMSP, Channel 9, which caught the Ibarras on camera just after they found it. The newscast featured a close-up image of the medallion, and hunt officials later allowed news photos to be taken of it for the first time.
This was the fourth time in the hunt's 53-year history that the medallion was found in Phalen Park. It was previously hidden there in 1958, 1973 and 1983. There were reports of up to 1,000 people in the park Wednesday night and Thursday morning, some of them looking since the 12th and final clue was made public just before midnight. Only 14 other hunts — including last year's — had required all the clues.
"I feel kind of bad" for the medallion hunters who searched the park all night, Ibarra said.
"They were here all night and we just walked in there and walked straight to it. It was right there. I feel sorry. Sorry," he said at a morning news conference to laughter from the media.
Unsuccessful medallion hunters won't be the only ones disappointed by the Ibarras' find.
"The kids, they are not going to like it," Ibarra said of his discovery without them. "The kids are the ones who kind of got me into it."
But Ibarra, who took the day off from his job at the Edina-based party supply company Apres to search for the medallion, said he planned to make it up to the kids by buying them games.
The couple wins $2,500 for bringing in the medallion, $2,500 for having clipped the clues from the newspaper and $1,200 in groceries from Cub Foods. They had not registered a Winter Carnival button, which would have earned them another $5,000.
Ibarra and his wife Virginia, 40, who works for an Edina video company, said they would use the money to pay some bills. The couple, who rent on the East Side, said they also would use some of the funds for a down payment on a house.
Copyright 2004 Pioneer Press.