My Crazy Solution

[susb8383]

For entertainment purposes, here's my crazy solve that made perfect sense at the time.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was sure that each clue solved to the name of a state park in New England and that somehow they would all fit together to indicate a place.

Half Moon State Park for Clue #5 because "She watches us like a mother" and it is in Hubbardston VT (as in Old MOTHER Hubbard) and is part of BomoSEEN State Park.

Pisgah State Park for Clue #6 because of the point to Hook's mouth, 21 'smiles' in the book, and the anagram to 21 miles (Pisgah is 21 square miles and is in Cheshire County).

Then for the Clue #8, "a native altar, a writer's tool" I went back to the book.

She mentions that she found a piece of raw graphite that she used to write in her journal. There's the writer's tool.

She uses the word 'native' once as part of the word 'alternative.' I thought this was a play on words: alter native.

Which led me to Mt. Monadnock because

1) There's an old graphite mine

2) The mine is at the base of Kiasticiticus Peak which is often described as the 'alternative peak.'

And then to confirm:

The five numbers from Clue #3 were: 2 11 19 22 28 and it says math is needed.

Clue #8 says the difference is 284 which is a math term.

So putting these two instructions together tells us to add 284 to those numbers, which gives:

286 295 303 306 312

To me these looked like compass headings.

I found that if I started at a central point of the end of the bike path she mentioned in the book, these headings pointed dead-on to these locations:

To Pisgah State Park NH: 295.25 degrees
To Half Moon State Park VT: 311.24 degrees (I’d feel better if this were closer to 312, but it was close enough)
To Kiasticiticus Peak (near the graphite mine) on Mount Monadnock NH: 303.14 degrees

And since Clue #8 said that the native altar/writer's tool were near the treasure and "treasure muscles you must flex" which made it sound like a hard hike, I was sure it was near the graphite mine on Mt. Monadnock.

The fact that I got these three locations from the clues and then they just happened to match the headings I got independently seemed like too big a coincidence to just be chance. But it was.

It made perfect sense until her hint came out that said it was in sight of the ocean.

[Deleted]

I know you’re beating yourself up because of the near miss - but I want to tell you, there’s a lot of brilliance in this thinking. I didn’t not think to use the 284 then adding it to the numbers individually to get bearings. Then to have those bearings match with names of parks that fit with clues - just a lot of creativity in this solution.

[susb8383]

Thanks. She said in an interview that her hunting with David in the book was a tutorial on how to do treasure hunts, and she mentioned that he used Google Earth to find distances, so it seemed to fit.