Nectar

As most people figured out pretty quickly, the poem below is to be interpreted as though you are a bee.

Fly up to the place that you would call home.

= Honeycomb Cliffs


Find a rose-colored post just off the North Dome.

The Honeycomb Cliffs feature has two main high points and is labeled in different spots on different maps which is why I specified "off the North Dome" (although, I should NOT have capitalized that). The "rose colored post" is one of Solitude's boundary signs that was closest to that high point (see the map below).

Written in ink only your eyes can see

In case you didn't know, bees can see into the UV spectrum. Thus, I wrote the keyword in a UV pen and one supposedly needs a UV light to reveal it. In reality, I was told by more than one searcher that you can see the word with the naked eye if you can catch the sunlight hitting it right.


Is the word that can be entered here as the key.

The keyword is WAGGLE



Once the keyword is entered (while the sun is out), a new screen appears that looks like this:

Use this dance to define a vector,
And beeline it to straight to that sweet nectar.




................................ (video may not autoplay on this page)










The waggle dance is a way that bees communicate with each other. It is used indicate where other bees can go to find patches of flowers that are a good source of food. The waggle dance is based the current location of the sun (so it slowly changes throughout the daytime). I first thought of using Sunset Peak to represent the sun in the waggle dance interpretation, but then I had the cooler idea to try to use the actual sun. It took me a LOT of extra time, but I created a table of sun azimuth readings that would adjust the rotation of my waggle dance video clip based on the time of day.
It was a pretty cool idea, but in reality it didn't work very nicely at first. For one thing, I had created the table based on June 6th (the launch day of my treasure hunts) and the times/angles were already pretty significantly different by the time anyone first found the keyword in late July. But more than that, I realized that my source of sun angle data (a website called sunearthtools.com) was actually just pretty bad. When searchers expressed their confusion, I decided to look into it and realized that I couldn't reproduce consistent results using the sunearthtools.com data. So I re-created the sun angle table using a better website and instantly got much better results (and apparently the finders did too).
I apologize for the shoddy puzzle design, but I also acknowledge that it was partly due to the inconsistent data from that website. I will say that I DID run through the solution steps on one of the first few days of June and it did produce good results at the time, so it seemed to me that nothing was amiss until searchers started emailing me.

This was one of those ideas (at least in its most general form) that I've been sitting on for years. When I first learned about the waggle dance, I was amazed! I immediately thought of the potential as a clue but never found a way to incorporate it into any of my escape rooms. At last, I was able to employ it here.


Check out the gps points on the map below for more photos and information.



Congrats to the finders!
I am told that it took a total of 6 hikes, 29.19 miles 11,966 ft of vert, so they earned it, haha.



"Things we found: a Nalgene, a metal water bottle, a cell phone, a hunting arrow, an old glass insulator, and trash. Things we saw: a moose and 2 baby moose, 2 pine martens, a common poorwill, a toad. It's been really fun exploring the area and seeing lots of wildflowers and also the sunsets. We also PRed a segment on Strava each time we went up :)"