Zor’s Story Teller Series of Caches

If you’re someone who receives notifications for newly published caches in rural NB near Moncton and Salisbury, you likely received a very large amount of email yesterday. The “Story Teller” series of caches was published yesterday around 1pm with the final two puzzle caches being published this morning. For those who are curious, here’s some details about this series of caches.

Last August, I travelled to Bangor Maine with Incepit to do the Tribute series of caches down there. Anyone familiar with that series knows that it’s basically 100 35mm micros hidden along a series of back logging roads. I set my personal best record of 135 finds in a single day on our first day there. It was nice to have a really long powertrail available.

I started thinking about trying to do a similar trail near Moncton. I didn’t want to use micros but I did want to do something similar where a lot of caches would be available in a relatively small area.

The original intention was to hide 100 caches along highway 126 between Moncton and Miramichi. Since it’s a little more than 100KM between here and there, it seemed to make sense to hide a single cache every kilometer. I also wanted to incorporate some sort of puzzle into the equation so that in order to solve the puzzle, you would have to find every cache as each cache would have a clue for the puzzle.

I started purchasing containers in September. Usually in batches of 10 but sometimes more. I would work myself towards 100 containers with the intention of doing the hiding in the spring. I took a day here and there to attach all of the wire hangers and secure them with some heavy duty duct tape. I passed on swag and pencils since I was hiding SO many caches but I did try to mix it up a bit with the containers. The bulk of them were lock-n-locks but there were some of my infamous crayon containers, as well as a bunch of tobacco cans.

As time passed, I realized that the idea of a powertrail seemed cool, but there was very little to see in going along a single road and hitting cache after cache. The monotonous nature of the caching I did in Maine did not seem all that appealing to me and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to hide all the caches, but find a way to make it a bit more interesting.

Upon looking at the map of Moncton I saw that between Salisbury and Elgin had only a cache here and there. I took a drive out that way and found all kinds of wooded areas, and some very scenic territory in spots. It became very obvious that this would be a better place for my caches. I knew I would be hiding them soon.

I still wanted to do a puzzle with the series but I wanted to reduce the maintenance. I also needed to be able to hide the whole series first without knowing where the puzzle caches would be hidden. I found a creative way to create some clues that worked for me. 14 of the 100 caches were given clues that were written in the log book and on the lid of the container. None of the cache listings indicate whether it has a clue or not so finders would have to find each cache in the series until they had all 14 clues. Those 14 clues would be used to solve two puzzle caches that are located in Riverview, NB.

The final puzzle cache, Zor’s Origin, would require clues from both of the previous puzzle caches, along with information obtained from each and every one of the caches in the Story Teller series.

So I sat down and wrote out a “story” about Zor, a character from the anime TV show Robotech which is where I got my name. I’ve used Zor for various purposes since I was in junior high. So the story kind of tells you about the character itself (a bit), some things about Robotech, and tells you about where I got my alias from.

I then took the story and broke it out into 100 phrases which I then used to name each of the caches in the Story Teller series. To solve the final puzzle cache, you’d have to answer a pile of questions about the “story” by putting together all 100 phrases. I made this a bit easier by creating a bookmark list that has all of the caches in it. Using the answers you found, along with the clues from both of the Story Teller puzzle caches, you could solve the math problem for Zor’s Origin and thusly find the cache itself.

The entire process was a lot of fun. I have a feeling that the three puzzle caches won’t see many finds but that’s ok. It was a lot of fun to do and I am hoping that folks enjoy having a pile of more caches out there to find. I will say that in hiding them, I stumbled upon some absolutely gorgeous scenery that I never knew anything about. I was really happy to get out there and see some areas not too far from home that I didn’t know existed. In knowing that this series will bring you to some of those places, I feel a lot better about where these have been hidden versus where I originally intended them to be.

Hopefully folks will enjoy them and the puzzles. Be sure to leave your comments on the series.