Dan has been playing with the Mini Venona puzzle in the GBA forums, and cracked a message coded in Russian leet. That led him to a sign board at a trail head on the Iron Horse trail in Dublin where he found some more Russian words. A rough translation led him to a bus stop in Dublin where he found a mini-cassette tape. We played the tape (after Janet scrounged up a player) and the latitude hint given was plain (a phone number 373-0711), but the rest of the message was a more or less unintelligble voice followed by touch tones.
I decoded the touch tones (using the spectrum analyzer in my evaluation copy of Amadeus) as 925 227-9891. This was not what we expected. We did a reverse phone number lookup and failed to get anything useful. I dialed the number, and it was out of service.
Later, minicacher pointed out that it was a pay phone number on the Dublin side of the BART station. He checked around there (the phone has been removed), as did Dan and I. We found nothing. Later I speculated that perhaps the longitude of that phone booth is what we needed (and Dan independently came up with the same thought). Google Earth indicated the coords would be very near the main trail going up Mission Peak.
Today Dan and I hiked up there. After some searching I inspected a small white ribbon like flag and saw what appears to be ciphertext. Here’s what it says,
HYPV IOEKN ZEBZ VHGFIBNF OPZIH NG OAU. WNFXV OMZS IAJNYL JFM RBHUIOG. ERGFHQRBQIOG FREIXL CVBNF NHZFVM PBQNTJOA OIKOIE.
Update 4:00 PM: Rogue Ramblers posts, This is a Vigenere cipher, keyword: VENONABANNER
MUCH VODKA MAKE RUSSIANS BLIND AS BAT. WASTE TIME VAINLY FOR NOTHING. RECOMMENDING SEARCH PHONE NUMBER LOCATION BETTER
On the way back down, I stopped for two caches, one being the final for Inca Gold. I had found all the prelim stages for this puzzle over a year ago, and lost some of the info, so needed Dan’s help a bit.
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