A broken hoe might have been key to Jake Ingebrigtson and Rob Brass turning up the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt medallion Wednesday.
The duo — now two-time winners after finding the puck in Hidden Falls park in 2007 — spent more than three days turning over snow in Lilydale Regional Park in their search. They were joined by thousands of other hunters.
“The place looked blown up,” Ingebrigtson said. “People had looked everywhere.”
When his hoe snapped early Wednesday, Ingebrigtson, 30, told Brass that they needed to rethink their approach.
“The only place in that park that hadn’t been searched was the path,” Brass said of a makeshift trail hunters had cut through the woods alongside the Mississippi River. The path was made of ice, several inches thick.
Ingebrigtson, armed with a long-handled ice pick, set to work on a patch next to a tree that had fallen across the path. Brass, 31 of Chaska, was on the other side of the log, chipping away with a hoe.
The two had settled on the fallen timber because it fit Clue No. 11 — a “tangle near the river” about “four dozen paces from the waterline.”
“It was ice, ice, ice,” said Ingebrigtson, of St. Paul. He said he turned to some nearby hunters and recited a bit of Clue 11 that he liked:
“I said, ‘Within this area lies medallion hysteria,’ and then I saw a big chunk of ice.”
Frozen into the chunk was the plastic medallion.
Ingebrigtson said he remembered yelling out, “Hey, guys, I think I found it.”
He had. It was wrapped in a clear plastic bag and had a photocopy of the Pulitzer Prize medal on it.
“Oh, my God, I’m a two-time finder,” Ingebrigtson said, puck in hand.
“All of a sudden, there’s a crowd of hundreds around us,” Brass said.
Instead of running to their car after the 1 p.m. discovery, the duo held up the medallion for everyone to see.
“We just thought, it’s everyone’s treasure, and they want to see it,” Brass said.
Brass and Ingebrigtson will split the $10,000 in prize money — $5,000 for turning in the medallion, $2,500 for having registered St. Paul Winter Carnival buttons and $2,500 for having all 11 published clues in the 12-clue contest, which was co-sponsored by Fury Motors.
Ingebrigtson said he would take his fiancee on a trip to Hawaii with the money. He also promised a bunch of other hunters dinner in St. Paul.
Brass, who is married, said the money would go toward his first child, due in February.
The duo have made bumping into each other — and finding the medallion — something of a habit in recent years.
The guys met up, by chance, in 2007 just outside Hidden Falls Regional Park on the third day of the hunt. Ingebrigtson found the medallion minutes later but credited Brass with pointing him to the spot. The early find prompted the Pioneer Press to hold a second, consolation hunt.
This year, the two ran into each other at Tony Schmidt Regional Park in Arden Hills, again on the third day of the hunt. They decided to search together the rest of the hunt.
The find marks the fourth time in the hunt’s 59-year history that the same hunter, or hunters, has found the puck twice and the first time it turned up in Lilydale.
The two credit perseverance — and a high threshold for pain — for their success.
“At Clue 11, you have no energy,” Brass said just before he was to appear at a Pioneer Press news conference announcing the find. “I can’t even feel my back right now.”
John Brewer can be reached at 651-228-2093.
Copyright 2010 Pioneer Press.
