This hunt was all about the vibrant COLORS found in Nails’ spicy bok choy salad, so please don’t get mad at us for sprinkling a generous portion of RED herring into the recipe (to say nothing of the numerous additional and unintentional connections that searchers made). After all, we did ask you to consider “What is red? What is not?” :) Plus, the solve was pretty straightforward in the end, so we needed to give you a little something extra to “chew on” to partially obscure the final location and ensure it wouldn’t become overrun with treasure seekers on day one! Quick note on this: We will not always (or even regularly) add intentional red herrings to our hunts; it just felt deliciously appropriate (and somewhat necessary) to do so in this particular hunt given the relatively simple (and cipher-free) solve mechanism once the true clues were seen in the right light :)
Now back to the solve. It wasn’t easy to follow the explicit instructions given in this puzzle, what with background images and textual flourishes. BUT, if you followed this recipe to the letter, you may have found yourself questioning why Nails was so picky about the salt being pink (but not Himalayan!), the pear being red, the beets being pickled, the pecans being roasted, and the pepper being white. Indeed, the specificity was necessary because every single ingredient, to the letter, doubles as a color. More specifically, an official color from the most famous color system in the world — PANTONE. Turns out, more than just a few Pantone colors have been named after foods and spices! Every Pantone color is uniquely coded in such a way that, with hardly any manipulation (just change the dashes to decimal points), it can be used as (or within) a Decimal Degrees GPS coordinate coding system. In this case, Step One of the recipe instructed you [0+] to start with zero and add:
Bok choy 13-6208
Olive oil 16-0847
Pink salt 13-1511
For a total of [positive] 42.8566.
Step Two instructed you [0-] to start with zero and subtract:
Red pear 19-1536
Pickled beet 19-2420
Roasted pecan 17-1052
Chili oil 18-1440
Spicy mustard 14-0952
Smoked paprika 19-1429
White pepper 15-1307
(Optional) Lemon zest 13-0756
For a total of [negative] 122.0136 (EXCLUDING the optional lemon zest).
If you put those coordinates together (42.8566, -122.0136), you’ll find yourself right on the doorstep (or, crater-step) of CRATER LAKE, which was the correct keyword solve for this hunt — and indeed, the perfect spot to cool off after a long hike OR a spicy bok choy salad!
A final note here: We initially planned to release the hunt without designating the lemon zest as optional. In other words, you would have had to “follow the recipe step by step” to come up with the most logical solve/destination within the possible options (and stopping just before the addition of the lemon zest would have brought you there). But that felt rather unnecessarily challenging (and arguably a touch subjective) if you had already made it that far. Thus, the early first clue (i.e., revealing the version of the puzzle that we intended to release with the last minute change) instructing that the lemon zest was optional, which left you with a binary option — and for puzzle-solving purposes, the lemon zest was NOT to be included! Its inclusion, however, remains highly recommended when making the real-life version of this vibrant salad :) We’ll see you back in the kitchen next time!
