...but in the end, old-fashioned digging usually brings home the medallion.
In the old days, medallion hunter John Barrett had just one weapon in his arsenal: Aunt Rita.
Barrett would depend on his brilliant great aunt Rita Schroth to decipher the clues to the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt. Schroth would ponder the hints and then send her 9-year-old nephew into the field to seek the elusive Treasure Hunt puck.
More than 35 years later, Barrett’s hunting partner is a high-tech toolbox, filled with an Internet-ready cell phone, a GPS navigation gadget and an online forum run by the Cooler Crew hunting group.
“To me, that provides instantaneous access to some really smart minds,” Barrett, 46, of Roseville said of the discussion board. “There are incredibly well-versed people on there in terms of medallion hunting.”
But is it fair?
The hunt has been around since 1952, and in many ways, it has retained an almost a magical simplicity from an earlier era. Yet the methods of the modern puck-seeker seem a far cry from those who had to rough it out before Google.
A trio of high school boys found the puck last year after threads on the www.twin cities.com discussion board pointed them to Battle Creek Regional Park. Medallion fanatics scrutinize every clue and spill their hunches on such forums, and the teens said they wouldn’t have known where to look had it not been for those tips.
Wrote one disgruntled hunter: “I’m glad everyone posts their thoughts on this thing so anyone in the city can find the medallion without even looking at a clue or figuring anything out on their own. The hunt used to be so much better when you actually had to THINK and WORK on your own to figure out the clues.”
Jesse Anibas of White Bear Lake doesn’t go that far, but he does long for the simpler days of the search.
“As I look back in history, I’d love to go back to the old days and try it the way it used to be, when everyone was on their own and there weren’t cell phones,” said Anibas, 40, who has written a book on Treasure Hunt history.
Lines outside the Pioneer Press building still form every night as hunters wait to buy the newspaper’s first edition, which typically comes out sometime after 11 p.m. By the time the Pioneer Press publishes the clues online at midnight, hunters have already text-messaged their friends or posted them on discussion boards from laptop computers.
The www.twincities.com Treasure Hunt board receives about a half-million page views during each hunt.
“We used to have a guy who lived in the Kellogg Place apartments, and he would always be the first one (to publish the clues online),” said Jason Michaelson, an Apple Valley software engineer who runs the Cooler Crew Web site at www.coolercrew.com. “He would walk across the skyway and go to his apartment, then post the clue so we didn’t have to stand in the freezing cold.”
In 2003, Anibas recalled, the 12th and final clue went on for a dozen lines. He suspects the clue writer intentionally created a long verse to thwart the use of cell phones. Anibas himself was searching for the puck in a park when he got the call from his hunting buddy. He remembers struggling to sit still and listen to the entire clue, especially because he didn’t have it written on paper.
Then there are the “geocachers.” Joel Dick, 29, of St. Paul is part of a diehard community that relies on GPS-enabled units to track hidden treasures not affiliated with the newspaper’s medallion.
Although the handheld gadgets won’t directly help anyone find a Pioneer Press medallion, they do get hunters familiar with the parks in the off-season. They also can serve as virtual breadcrumbs – hunters can mark coordinates they’ve visited to make sure they don’t double back to the same spot.
In addition, Dick has used mapping technology to plot the precise medallion locations of years past. He’s hoping the exercise will eventually pay off.
“I tend to think lightning wouldn’t strike twice in the same place,” Dick said.
For those bummed out because they don’t have the latest gadgetry, fear not. Barrett said his biggest lesson came before dawn one morning in 1981.
He was foraging through the grounds at Roseville’s Acorn Park next to a man with a metal detector – that era’s gizmo of choice. Exasperated, the man threw aside the metal detector and started digging through the leaves with his hands. He abruptly left moments after, saying only that he “had to go.”
You know how the story ends. Barrett saw the same man on the news the next day, for he had won the medallion hunt.
“My advice is don’t worry about the high-tech stuff,” Barrett said. “Go out there and look.”
Laura Yuen can be reached at lyuen@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5498.
HUNTING FOR TREASURE ONLINE
There’s plenty of Treasure Hunt chatter online. Jump in with your own theories, lurk in the background or just breeze through for laughs.
www.twincities.com – Features a forum where each clue undergoes extensive analysis, conjecture and ridicule. A must for die-hards hunters and casual observers alike.
www.coolercrew.com – The Cooler Crew treasure-hunting posse offers information on “mock” hunts, a map of previous medallion locations and instructions on how to access a pay-to-post discussion board.
www.wintercarnival.8m.com – Created by medallion enthusiast Jesse Anibas, site features history of the Treasure Hunt and a fun trivia quiz.
Copyright 2007 Pioneer Press.