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Nathaniel receives check for $300.00 for solving this Puzzle.

Congratulations Stuart. 

News:  Contest #4 has been solved (12-26-99). There are now no other puzzles yet to be solved in this series (1999 Series). The new series (March Series) has started, and will be in full swing by March 8, 2000.  Click here for more information on this contest and the winner.

News:  Contest #2 has been solved (1-17-2000). There are now no other puzzles yet to be solved in this series (1999 Series). The new series (March Series) has started, and will be in full swing by March 8, 2000.  Click here for more information on this contest and the winner.

Want to see an explanation of all Treasure Hunt Clues?  Click here.

Major Contest Winner -- Treasure Hunt 1999

Mountain Mike presents plaque, and a check for $1,000.00, to "Super-Sleuth" Kurt Meldrum.

On December 19 Kurt Meldrum, a Grand Rapids, MI auto specialist, found the hidden treasure for 1999 and won $1,000.00.  What a nice Christmas present!  (Click here if you would like to see an explanation of all the clues for this contest.  This is in pdf format.  This means you need Acrobat Reader, which you can download from the original main page of this site.)

Kurt holds nail with treasure wrapped around it	Close-up of wax-covered treasure
Arrows show hole in post where treasure was found	Mike examines dock that served as "home" for treasure for 2 1/2 years!

"Thrice" (trice) overlooked

Kurt did a great job!  He solved some of the toughest clues on his journey toward success.

There was a short award ceremony at the location where he found the treasure, at 1 PM on Wednesday, December 22.  

Kurt shared a few of his experiences in his search for the treasure.  In one instance, he was checking out some bird houses at the Park.  He thought that the treasure might have been hidden in one of them.  Suddenly a mouse jumped out of the bird house, and up his arm.  Still, however, he persisted.

Here are some of his comments regarding his adventure:

Dear Mike,

 Thanks for a tremendous game.  I thoroughly enjoyed the chase.  You can imagine my excitement as I pulled the nail from the dock to reveal the $10 bill and the successful conclusion of the hunt.  Here's how I did it:

 About a month ago, I was driving down 28th Street and noticed the sign.  I was aware of the hunt but the addition of the web site made my interest peak.  So, I visited the site and downloaded the old clues.

 The first one I solved was the yahoo map clue.  This took some stumbling around and started with doing a search for Ada, Michigan and then substituting in different characters from the clue.  After several attempts, I realized the pattern and then it was just deciding when to switch from 6 to 5 to 4 to 3.  I was thrilled when I hit enter and a map of Ada Park appeared.  This is a public place that could be used for the prize location.

 Next I checked a series of pictures.  Originally I started with the picture of the fish.  From this I did a search of the word Movenpick.  This resulted in an Italian web site (all in Italian) for a hotel.  It had a drop down menu for different location in the resort.  One of the locations was movenpick.  When I clicked on this location it showed me the pool area, so I thought I would be looking for a pond.  Checking the file name of several other pictures reinforced this conclusion:  Mike by the pond, pond.gif,... 

Next I went to the park.  When I looked on the map of the park to see if there was a pond, I noticed the three gazebo's overlooking the pond.  This fit with the "trice overlooked clue".  I searched the pond area but came up with nothing.  Back to the drawing board.

 I thought "Mom, Dad, and probably Bob can help you"  referred to a bobber so I believed the fishing pond was correct.  I solved the clue "Miss piggy's verde pal's perch" and thought maybe a lily pad or the fountain in the middle of the pond. 

My next big break came when I solved clue 6a, 6b, and 6c.  "What ships and bad employees have in common".  I knew this had to be docked, so back to the park I went.  At this time I had not found the small dock at the back of the pond, so I searched the fishing dock with no luck.  I also looked extensively for a chain leading into the water since I thought the bill might be in the water attached to a chain ("lookclose" had a chain on a watch, later I thought this meant break time).

 The third trip to the park revealed the second dock at the back of the pond.  I searched this several times and could not find the prize.  At this time, you started releasing the driving directions and caused me great concern.  It appeared you were ready for someone to find this prize and the clues were getting to easy.  The driving directions confirmed my earlier thoughts that I was in the right place.  My son-in-law and I solved clue 5a, 5b, and 5c, but it was not helpful since it matched the driving directions.  Clues 9 & 10 only seemed to be leading to the park so we didn't spend much time on them (ball diamond, park, court, rail,..).  Clue 12 may have meant change since all had something to do with change.  I solve the clue from 6/19/99 but did not understand the significance.  In hind sight I think the clue for 7/11/99 had something to do with the number of the park (1180) but not sure.  The september_clue.html threw me for quite a while until I hit the refresh button on my computer and notice the box at the bottom that read "leaves, trees, pond, picnic table".  Then I was sure that I was in the right place.

 My wife and I thought the clue for 8/15/99 meant a nail but this still didn't result in a something we could find.  Finally after several trips to the park, on Sunday Dec. 19, 1999 my son-in-law and I went to the park to conduct a massive search.  We had received the 11th driving clue and knew it was past the gazebo's.  My initial search of the dock resulted in finding the nail but I could not remove it.  So I went back to the car to get a tool.  My son-in-law continued the search of the park.  When I returned with a crowbar, I pulled the nail, found the prize, and went to find my son-in-law.  He was on his way back to the dock because he had figured out that the nail served no useful purpose in the construction of the dock and had to be the prize.

 That is most of my story.  It was great fun.

Kurt Meldrum

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Contest 2, June 1999 Series

Congratulations to Stephen Meldrum.  He solved Contest Number 2 in the June 1999 contest series.  His successful submission for contest 2 was as follows: 

• approximate date the text was composed:  Ur III Dynasty (ca. 2094-2047 b.c.), In the reign of Su-sin, Year 8Ba, month 10
• Reasonably accurate English rendering of the text:  "Gold was deposited by Nur-Samas via Zamama (this was a copy of the original tablet)
• You must provide the generally accepted name of the author and the recipient:  the author appears to be I'-li-an-dul (line 7 of the tablet) and the recipient Zamama
• You must indicate where the tablet originate:  tablet was found in Drehem, Southern Mesopotamia, (current day Iraq)

While the rendering is open to a certain level of subjectivity, I determined that the submission was certainly within limits of demonstrable accuracy.

Here is the original:

Congratulations, again, to Stephen!!!!

Want to see the solution to the meaning of the clues for Contest 2?  Click on the image above.

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Contest 4, June 1999 Series

Double congratulations to Stephen Meldrum.  He also solved the "Impossible Puzzle," Contest Number 4.  Here is his correct submission:

1.  Author: Stephen Hawking

 

2.  Title:  Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays

 

3.  Publisher:  Bantam Books

 

4.  October 1993

 

5.  Page Number on which Citation Appears:  69

 

6.  a Total Rendering of the Plaintext Citation:

 

In the early years of the twentieth century, two new theories completely changed the way we think about space and time, and about reality itself.

More than seventy-five years later, we are still working out their implications and trying to combine them in a unified theory that will describe everything in the universe. The two theories are the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Here is a letter Steve sent accompanying his solution:

Mountain Mike,

 

Your puzzles are Great!!  My brother Kurt introduced me to your website (purplehunt.com) a few weeks ago.  Since then my sons and I have sat around the computer together working on the Impossible Puzzle (contest #4), hoping we weren't so far behind that we didn't have a chance. 

 

We are really excited about being the first to submit the correct solution!!

 

I was born and raised in Alpena, MI but work has taken me to Ucon, Idaho where I work as a Senior Training Analyst for a Department of Energy research laboratory. 

 

Here is basically how we solved this puzzle:

1. being new to your site... we recorded the clue of 5/30 giving ciphertext h and partial plaintext i...and didn't realize there were more "used clues available"
2. we found clues for ciphertext & plaintext given 7/3, 7/11,11/6, 11/14, & 11/21 - looking at the ciphertext it is noticeable that the character 'r' appeared more often than any other character, so we experimented with r = e, .  Also we were lead to conclude that the h given in the first line must me a 't' to complete the word 'the'. 
3. Now a miracle occurs:  James (12yr old) looks at e-e--t---- and says that word is 'everything'   (Me) "you think so?"  "let's plug it in."  That word gave us 7 ciphertext-plaintext keys.  Then Alex (9yr old) looks at our newly decoded --r-ing  and says "that word is ' working' ." This gives us 3 additional keys.  With the freebies you gave we had half the alphabet.
4. At that point using patterns, two letter word possibilities and sentence structure relationships we were able to decipher all the cipher text we had.
5. Analysis of the portion of the citation we had indicated that the document was scientific and historical, written in third person, which lead me to guess the line ' In the early years of the twentieth century'. We knew we were looking for a scholar.
6. What really blew this open for us was the html page given on 9/5 (plasma11.html) What a great clue!  I thought there was hidden text, I worked this page over pretty good.  I highlighted what I thought was text and pasted it into my word processor, changed fonts and colors yet nothing showed. Then I ran the 'word count' feature which told me that there were a bunch of blank spaces but no characters. Hmmm?  That lead me to look at the source code for the page and discovered the name "Stephen Hawking" embedded in the code.  The moment I saw that name I new it had to be the author.
7. Plugged Stephen Hawking into Amazon.com and reduced the titles down to those that I thought coincided with the phrases we had deciphered.  Sent my brother off to the book store with clue 9/19  which said that page 85 should have content related to gravitational collapse.  Bingo!  Table of contents revealed Einstein's Dream and the full citation. The book was published in two different years as hardback then paperback.
8. Many clues fell into place.  synthesized voice , Einstein as a ancestor (larger brain than normal), 10/3 - cosmologist vs cosmetologist, 10/17 - Hawkings is like Dawkins,  9/12 - Stephen Hawking - Stephen King - Larry King
9. Kurt did some number crunching to decode the clue on 9/26 to validate Stephen Hawking.

There are still some clues that intrigue me that I can not solve.  I am looking forward to seeing their solutions.

 

This puzzle was great fun!  Thanks for the challenge.

Above:  Super Sleuth Stephen Meldrum working on a project.
Below:   The secret of Stephen's success, the Meldrum boys.

Congratulations to Nancy Garber and Team Garber for winning Contest 3.  

The solution submitted was:  "Our ball men make a better ball pen"

(the solo s should be an m)

--Team Garber

Want to see the solution to the meaning of the clues for Contest 3?  Click here.

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My first first major contest was in 1992.   At that time it was  called the "Mountain Mike 'Sure-Luck Holmes' Treasure Hunt."

That contest ran for fourteen weeks.   The goal of the contest was to find a special ten-dollar bill that I had hidden.   I published clues once a week.

The winner was a young mother named Christine Stoutjesdyk.  For her successful efforts, Christine received $1000 from Mountain Mike, a lovely engraved wall plaque, and a lot of good press.

Christine (with her kids often patiently or impatiently waiting for mom in the car) diligently and strategically investigated each clue for three and a half months, thru cold winter snows and early spring rains until she found the treasure.

Christine found the treasure tightly rolled up and securely inserted into a knot-hole in a telephone pole at the corner of Butterworth Ave. and John Ball.

Christine said the clue that gave it away was the last one:  "Have you read about any good garage sales lately?"

From that clue she correctly concluded that it would be on a corner electric pole, where garage sale signs are frequently posted.

She especially liked this particular pole because it was a "solid mass of old nails from old garage sales."   Christine methodically surveyed every inch of the pole until she came upon the treasure.

Christine is no stranger to treasure hunting.  Three years in a row she solved the local Channel 35 Auction Treasure Hunt.

Major congratulations should go to Christine.  She beat out twenty thousand amateur and professional sleuths, some coming from as far away as San Francisco, Atlanta and Boston.

Amazingly, out of the fourteen weekly clues published, Christine had correctly solved twelve of them. 

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Bill Moore of Grand Rapids was another $1000 winner of my Treasure Hunt.

Bill, a 44 year old business man, took 26 weeks, and 26 clues, to find the treasure. 

Again I quizzed the winner as to how well he handled all the clues, and I was pleased that Bill had correctly interpreted nearly all the clues on his way to finding the treasure.

Bill found the ten dollar bill (same one that Christine found) under the main sign outside a public library in Kentwood Michigan.

The competition was very tough.   We estimate that 60,000 people were searching along with Bill for the treasure.  

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With many of our contests we engage a local charity.  In this case I present a check for $1000 to the American Cancer Society.  Because I made the presentation out of character, I have graphically added my "Mountain Mike" appearance to protect my anonymity.  Click here if you would like to read a letter from a local publisher regarding these earlier contests.

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