It was meant to be.
A woman from the East Side of St. Paul said finding the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt medallion in Cherokee Heights Park will help her afford medicine she needs that isn’t covered by insurance.
Lynn Olson-Tuma will take home $10,000 for the find — a prize she’s been after for nearly 20 years — and will use some of the funds to buy medication to treat her Lyme disease.
“I was having a little conversation with God,” Olson-Tuma said. “If I’m meant to find this, I will.”
Olson-Tuma, joined Wednesday by her husband Scot Tuma, followed the daily clues to a well-searched section of the West Side park and used a garden hoe and spade to rifle through piles of snow and leaves. The couple focused on an area just east of the entrance to the Bruce Vento Nature Trail.
Before long, Olson-Tuma, 40, found a cocklebur-covered hunk of ice.
“It was in someone else’s tailings,” Tuma, 37, said, assuming previous hunters had accidentally tossed the mass aside.
Also there were two empty Bailey’s Irish Cream bottles inches away.
“They were working too hard on those instead of chipping at the ice,” he said.
Olson-Tuma was studying the object and trying to crack it open with her hand tool, she said, when Tuma went at it with his long-handled spade. He cleaved off a large section of ice and noticed something odd.
“I held it up and showed Lynn, ’cause you could see there’s a little bit of a magenta color in there, which isn’t the normal cocklebur color,” he said.
“I’m like, what is that? I think we found it,” Lynn said. “And then he saw the ‘Fury.’ ”
The plastic medallion had a magenta-colored snowflake design floating in it and hunt-sponsor “Fury Jeep” imprinted on it.
“I’m like, that’s it, there’s no way there would be writing on the middle of a cocklebur blob on something,” Tuma said.
“I was like, ‘We found it!’ And then I kind of started screaming and crying and … yes,” Olson-Tuma said.
“And then I didn’t know what to do,” Tuma said.
A group of fellow hunters swarmed, snapping pictures with the puck and congratulating the couple on the find.
The husband and wife claimed their prize money in front of another crowd at the Pioneer Press building during an afternoon news conference.
Olson-Tuma said some of the money would also go to buying their 4-year-old son Liam a new bed.
A few bucks would go to buying the couple some sought-after records at a used record shop.
The finder said she spent much of this year’s hunt noodling clues on her phone at night and driving for hours between parks with her mother, trying to place hints with landmarks.
She said Clue 5, which said, “Nature does what nature wills; And gobbles up man’s silly frills,” led her to the hiding spot — a tree nearby had engulfed a section of chain-link fence.
Olson-Tuma also revealed, much to the grief of day-in, day-out treasure hunters, how much time she spent out of her car searching for the puck Wednesday.
“Five minutes. Sorry,” she said.
John Brewer can be reached at 651-228-2093.
Copyright 2013 Pioneer Press.
