Leakage from a Cluttered Mind

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.

Today I hit the road at 5:15 AM to head north to Clear Lake to meet up with a group heading into the hills north of the lake. By leaving that early I had clear sailing to Santa Rosa, where I stopped for breakfast at the Omelette Express. Besides being a tasty breakfast, there was a lot of it, and despite stuffing myself in anticipation of a very long caching day I couldn’t clean my plate.

I hit the turnoff to Clear Lake in Hopland with enough spare time that I stopped for a couple of caches along highway 175. Close to Hopland the road winds through a pretty area of vineyards and farmland, but soon turns into a windy road snaking through the mountains to Clear Lake.

I arrived at our designated meeting spot in Lakeport (a gas station) before anyone else, so I gassed up and popped over to nearby Jack’s place to grab a cache. By the time I returned the Peninsula contingent had arrived (Matt/mjp303, Ben/bthomas, Brad/geobrowns, Tom/MotorBug with passenger Chris/airsax). After they all gassed up we stopped at a Subway so MotorBug could get a sandwich for lunch, and of course, the rest of us found the nearest cache. As we headed for Bartlett Springs Road with mjp303 in the lead, he couldn’t resist stopping for a couple of caches on the way.

Once on the dirt, we hit three high terrain caches, with the most memorable being this one with near vertical faces. We were all over this rock and confused about the description and hint. Geobrowns finally braved one of the near vertical cliff faces and made the find.

We stopped at Bartlett Springs. Apparently a recent fire destroyed a small bottling plant (perhaps it was already abandoned).

A mile or so beyond Bartlett Springs I got a flat on my right front tire. It turns out something (probably a sharp rock) put a 1.5″ slice through the tread and steel belts. I had to run the rest of the weekend without a spare.

As we proceeded on we drove by Indian Valley Reservoir, which was extremely low. Noticing there was a terrain 5 kayak cache near the normal lake shore, we decided to drive out on the dry lake bottom and see how close we could get. We did fine getting there and finding the cache. But then the adventure started.

The following photos tell the story. First we had vehicles sliding sideways downhill in soft shale, and then getting stuck in some really gooey mud. We had to do a tandem tow to get them out.

The lake bed mudhole really slowed us down from our plan and we didn’t reach our next cache until after sundown. It was another terrain 4.5, so doing it by flashlight was even more of an adventure. Bthomas and mjp303 found the best approach and made the find. The next attempt was at a terrain 5 cache, and while bthomas made it to the top he couldn’t find the cache, before his headlamp began to fade.

On the drive back towards highway 20 we picked up another 4 caches, so my total for the day was 15 caches.

After checking into our motel (Travelodge) we headed to Kathies Inn for dinner. By the time we were done and back to the motel it was 9:30 PM or so, and I was beat.