Around this time of year, Diana Putney has a ritual.
At 11:30 p.m., she gets off her night shift at the First Bank System's Energy Park Drive operations center and drives to the St. Paul Pioneer Press building in downtown St. Paul. There she purchases the next day's paper. Then she climbs back into her car, lights a cigarette and gets "real quiet." The 33-year-old Roseville resident opens the paper, peruses the next clue and picks up her cell phone to call her hunting partner of 14 years, Kathie Hanson.
The next morning, one or both of them set out in the daylight to start digging.
"It's a big deal to us," said Putney, standing outside the newspaper's office on a recent night. "I was born and bred in St. Paul, and without the Winter Carnival, what's to winter? This is our excitement.
"We've got clues that we've saved that date back probably 20 years. We compare them to each year. Three times we've been standing next to the people who've found it: once at Mounds Park in the triangle, once down at Hidden Falls and the other time at Highland. Lord knows, this is our year, I hope."
So . . . where is it?
"I can't disclose that," she laughs. "We have an idea. We've already been to four parks, checking out the clues. Now we've got one picked out."
Phalen?
"Maybe."
Mounds?
"Maybe. Definitely the east side of St. Paul, I'll tell you that much."
Copyright 1998 Pioneer Press.
