Untamed with the Lester Tang Conjecture: "Grease Fire" in Muir Woods

You may have guessed that this photo is not from Muir Woods, but from the starting parking lot where another photo came from. You would be right.

Back in the trusty green van, I asked the mapping software to plot our course to Muir Woods. Meanwhile, Tom was looking at a paper map, and found a quick route. Finally, the software finished chugging and displayed its scientifically-derived route: longer than Tom's route, along twistier roads. We kept getting better results from our paper maps than from the GPS/mapping software combination. I grimaced. I shut down the laptop as the trusty green van made its way to Muir Woods National Monument by paper-map navigated route.

Soon we were in the parking lot. We needed a plan: Redwood Creek runs down the middle of Muir Woods National Monument. There were four bridges over this creek. We wanted to find a Game Control person between bridges two and four. But there were two trails, one on each side of the creek. We needed to check both trails.

So the plan was: Tom would stay back in the van. I would head up the right-hand trail. Peter and Toby would head up the left-hand trail. And so I power-walked along the trail. I kept my secret-word badge covered behind my clipboard. I made my way past slow tourists. It seemed a little sad to walk through a spot as pretty as Muir Woods in such a hurry. I was looking for Game Control, not looking at trees. Then again, I'd seen Muir Woods plenty of times. I kept power-walking. All the way to Bridge Four.

Hoping to report my lack of progress, I tried radio-ing my colleagues on the other side of the creek. I could not raise them. How sure was I that I hadn't cluelessly walked past someone from Game Control? Pretty sure. I crossed Bridge Four over to the lefthand side. I walked up the left-hand trail.

Through the trees, I saw someone standing still. Though I could only catch skinny glimpses, it was obviously Brent Holman of Game Control. I'd started playing puzzle hunt games because I wanted to open up some new paths of thinking in my brain; apparently, one of those new paths was a quick ability to recognize Brent Holman. This suggested that there were flaws in my long-term brain-building goal, but was good news for my short-term goal of picking up our next clue.

I picked up our next clue and tried radio-ing again. Again no reply.

So the next question: What was the quickest way to get everyone back to the van? Obviously, the right-hand trail was quicker than the left-hand trail. If I headed back that way, and could radio my team-mates who were still coming up the left-hand trail, we could all make it back to the van that much faster. But if I couldn't raise them on the radio, and if they walked all the way to Bridge Four, only to be told that their team-mate had already picked up the clue and headed back, they would take a long time getting back. So I headed back along the left-hand trail to make sure that didn't happen.

The smart thing I did: I kept trying the radio periodically until I reached my team-mates. Thus I could tell them to turn back to the van. The dumb thing I did: My team-mates had the WOLF with them, but I didn't tell them the code number for this clue. If I'd told them that, the WOLF would have started its timer earlier, and we would have received clues earlier. As it was, we didn't enter the code number until we were back at the van.

Anyhow, back at the van, we confronted the puzzle. It started out like this:

Grease Fire

From my corner seat I saw Ken stumble in. He wasn't the smoothest guy around, but he had an undeniably astute mind.

"Hi Ken," I muttered. "What's the word?"

"Coffee," he said, grabbing a chair as the waitress filled our cups. Her skin haunted me. It was pale and smooth and damn near perfect. A night creature, I thought. Just like me.

I glanced at Ken. "You think she's ever seen the sun?"

"Damn it, Ike. You've got to focus."

...

It went on in this hard-boiled, hard-to-figure vein. We stared at it for a while. We ate sandwiches. We tried counting things. We tried many things that didn't work.

Every so often, the WOLF would beep to give us a hint. The first hint was "Unmake edits." We wasted some time looking for typos. The second hint was "Shinteki Untamed." Oh, anagrams. We were looking for anagrams of "Shinteki Untamed". Later hints told us what to do when we found those anagrams. Also around this time, the WOLF gave us the option of giving up.

Here, I made another mistake. This is an especially shameful mistake, because I underestimated my friends and I underestimated the appeal of puzzle hunts. We had two choices: spot all the anagrams and then follow the hint directions, or give up. To spot all the anagrams, we could type in the text and write a little python script.

I suggested that we give up. I figured that if we tried to find all of the algorithms, two people would have been sitting idle while two people played with laptops. And I thought the two idle people would have been really bored.

In hindsight, that was dumb. Later, I would see everyone on the team deal with worse adversity than this. And they handled it fine. And of course, they wouldn't really have been idle--they could have been getting organized for the next puzzle.

Anyhow, we gave up and let the WOLF tell us the next location: Muir Beach Overlook.

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