Luis and Virginia Ibarra put their daughter on the school bus early today, got in their car and drove to nearby Phalen Park to look for the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt medallion.
Ten minutes later, the St. Paul couple was holding the treasure, which had drawn more than 1,000 folks to the park last night.
The treasure was found shortly before 8 a.m.
That's not to say they had not worked at it. They had. This was the third year they had spent time in the annual hunt.
The family, which includes Maragrita, 12, Luis Angel, 13, and Vanessa, 17, worked together to decipher the daily clues and went looking on Saturday and some again Wednesday.
"There were a lot of people around, but it was just there, where a hill starts to rise. There was something shiny in the snow, and I popped it up with a stick I was using," Luis Ibarra said in an interview.
The couple wins $2,500 for bringing in the medallion, $2,500 for having clipped and saved all the clues from the newspaper and $1,200 in groceries from Cub Foods. They had not registered a Winter Carnival button, which would have earned them another $5,000.
Luis, 41, works for Apres, a party supply company, and Virginia, 40, works for an Edina video company.
Copyright 2004 Pioneer Press.
