They spotted the perfect V-shaped trees. Then they saw the huge snowbank between them.
But that’s what the final clue of the 67th annual Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt called for: “(L)ook for two trees / That seem to exclaim a Vulcan Victory,” the final clue said. “You’ll have much for to thank if you dig in a snowbank.”
Rob Brass and a few friends eyed that snowbank Wednesday night — 6 feet of crusty ice, packed down by plows, and spread 10 feet along the median in a Harriet Island Regional Park parking lot. They’d been digging for eight hours that day (and for the last six) but they attacked. And all but flattened that snowbank.
“It was almost all gone. … And there was a little toaster-size of snow left,” Brass, 38, of Chaska, said Thursday. “And I went to get it and did nothing, and I did it again and it just popped out. … The whole thing came down, and there was this little piece left.”
For the treasure he found — a 2-inch diameter medallion, the color of ice — Brass received the full $10,000 prize: $5,000 for turning in the medallion, $2,500 for having a registered St. Paul Winter Carnival button and $2,500 for having all 12 published clues in the contest, co-sponsored by Fury Motors.
It was the third Pioneer Press medallion victory he’d been involved with. He worked with a partner, Jake Ingebrigtson, in the 2007 and 2010 victories. Ingebrigtson was not far away Wednesday, but working with Brass on the snowbank were other crew buddies Steve Worthman, Steven Sanftner, Matt Koskie and Stacey King.
Brass is sharing the loot with those four, he said Thursday.
His wife, Steph, explained. “He’s really committed to the hunt, really committed to the culture of the hunt, and supporting it in every way, so he wants to give the opportunity to everyone” who worked on it with him, she said.
Plus, she said: “He didn’t get through that snowbank by himself.”
“It was really a group effort because had I been there myself, I couldn’t have even warded off the other people,” he said. “But the five of us digging together, we formed an alliance … and we just said right there on the spot, if we find it we’re all in this together.”
He said at a news conference Thursday: “We did it together, and that’s how I’ll remember it.”
SCRAMBLED CLUE
After Wednesday’s sun and relative warmth, a stiff wind had picked up by evening, coming straight off the Mississippi River and searing searchers’ faces. Still, hundreds of hunters mobbed Harriet Island as clue time neared. Cars were parked for blocks nearby.
The final clue dropped in scrambled form at 10:30 p.m. The real deal comes out an hour later, but the scrambled version took just a few minutes of noodling — they were already aware of the trees, and most features of the 70-acre park — and 40 minutes of digging.
Brass took that last swing for the puck around 11:15. It was frozen in a can cooler and tucked inside a chunk of a flattened football.
A few loud whoops went out in the park, and soon hunters streamed toward the group, gathering around Brass to congratulate him and get a glimpse of the medallion.
‘BOLD, A LITTLE BIT GENIUS’
A couple of clues mentioned “lot,” so Brass and his crew figured it would be near a parking lot. “Or could it even be in a parking lot? And then we joked about, ‘Well, if I hid the medallion, I’d put it right there in the median because everyone will walk past it.’ And it wound up being there like two days later,” he said in Thursday’s news conference.
“The hiding spot was pretty bold and a little bit genius. A little bit of both. It’s clearly very clever and it stumped everybody.”
LEARNED FROM AN EXPERT
Brass employed a maneuver he learned from his mom, in the down-to-the-wire search Wednesday: “boxing people out.”
Brass’ mother, Marcia Brass, of Shoreview, had taken Rob out hunting as early as age 7 or 8, and later his younger brother Rick; she was out in the hunt Wednesday night. She taught her boys young how to ward off opportunists late in the search when it’s wall-to-wall people, she said.
“Wall people out, box them out,” Rob Brass said.
Brass and his crew stood side by side and dug, while other hunters hit the other side. But “we had a bigger portion of it” — and soon it became theirs, he said.
Copyright 2018 Pioneer Press.
