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I had learned my lesson: we navigated to the Muir Beach Overlook by paper map. And it was good.
At Muir Beach Overlook, we picked up the next clue. It was an audio CD. Its cover was adorned with cover art from several albums. The CD contained snippets from many songs.
The obvious way to start was to identify the songs. I think there were 16 tracks, and we identified two of them. There was much metal. No-one in our group knew much metal. We could have done internet searches to find songs based on lyrics: but that would involve driving to a place with wireless access. That was probably pretty far away. So we tried calling friends, and asking them for help. Our friends did not know these songs. They were able to get some songs by searching the internet for lyrics, but not all.
Over the previous weekend, Pete had hung out with a radio DJ. He called up this professional radio DJ for help with some stumpers. The DJ didn't know these songs. "My station plays soft rock, you know?"
I was beginning to regret having spent the previous four years listening to almost nothing but Japanese ska.
When the WOLF gave us the option of giving up, we pounced. We were going to a shopping center: Town Center Corte Madera.
In the shopping center parking lot, I stayed with the trusty green van while my team-mates went to pick up the next clue. They came back with tales of excitement: mall cops were tossing Game Control out of the mall. We were able to pick up our clue; other teams might not be so lucky.
The clue was a sketch showing Noah in his ark looking out at some animals. The animals were arranged in clusters by species. When you're in a game, you learn to count similar things, so the first thing we did was count the animals in each cluster.
7 . . . . . . . owls 2 . . . . . . . giraffes...five more clusters...
Were the numbers indexes into the animal names? No, there weren't seven letters in "owls".
Were the numbers indexes into the collective noun for these animals? Like, for 5 crows, should we take the 5th letter in "murder of crows"? Maybe. Tom called up his then-girlfriend Lisa Cowan. Lisa had her Master's degree in computer science, and was working on her next computing degree. Could she look up some collective nouns on the internet? You bet she could.
1234567 7 parliaMent of owls 2 cOrps of giraffes...five more clusters...
M O... We were looking at "monster". We had solved this one quickly. This was a puzzle where you either saw the path immediately or didn't, and we saw it. I looked around the van, saw smiling faces. The mood had lightened. I may have said something rash about owing Lisa a dinner. (Fortunately, Lisa is in San Diego, so I will probably never have to make good on that.)
Our next clue awaited us in San Anselmo Memorial Park.