The Cooler Crew Discussion Board Archives

You Dig?

The original Water Cooler, as we knew it, ceased to exist on Thursday, February 7, 2002 at 7:14 pm. Most Coolerheads had anticipated this change, as Knight-Ridder had been doing it with its other newspaper properties, as well. As a result of this anticipation, I took on a mission to collect and save as many of the medallion hunt posts to the cooler as i could in that time. The 2000-2001 and 2002 hunt threads are presented as they originally appeared. Earlier hunt threads are what has been pieced together by others. In time, these archives will be parsed out and incorporated into the overall historical archive. Until then, what we have is what we have.

Once the Water Cooler change happened, there was a mad scramble to find a suitable replacement site that had the same format as our old Cooler. What we came up with was a site called The Peoples Forum, which had been accepting refugees from several other Web Crossing based sites at the time. PF started having financial troubles of its own in 2005, and again, we were again facing the possibility of our discussion board shutting down. Again preparing for this, I put together a script to archive as much of our content as possible. The content from PF has been extracted from several hundred megabytes of xml files that were generated from the contents of the PF HTML output. As the data is processed, the PF archive will be populated with the actual posts and author information from the original site.

Now that we're at ableminds, we feel a little more secure in our discussion board host. After all, everyone who participates pays for the access. However, that won't prevent a running discussion archive from there as well. The script to do it is a work in progress, and priority is given, of course, to getting the PF archive up in one "piece".

In the meantime, sit back, and reminisce about treasure hunts of days gone by.

Contributions encouraged

This site is dedicated to the St. Paul Pioneer Press Medallion Hunt, a main attraction of the annual St. Paul Winter Carnival that takes place every year in the smaller of the Twin Cities. For more on the Winter Carnival, try the following:

Cooler Crew Medallion Hunt Discussions (This link is for Coolerheads who have already registered at ableminds. The registration link is below

-- If you are not registered on the Discussion board, click here

Winter Carnival HQ

Treasure Hunt Headquarters

Treasure Hunter's Guide

Kings Commons

Camo Crue

For a complete list of treasure hunting resources, visit our links page.

The Here and Beyond

All the clues from all the years are now available. They're not currently as perfectly explained as they ought to be, but we're getting there. As time permits, the clue descriptions will be cleaned up and anecdotes will be added to make you laugh and clap. The individual hunt pages through the 1970s are dynamically generated by the web server, and may contain links to the more recent hunts, whose content differs from the static pages; At the moment, we're working on getting all of the supplemental information into the same dynamic page engine as the clues are. As we do, more of the site will be converted to the dynamic pages you currently see, and links may be temporarily broken as a result. If you ever find anything that offends you, don't hesitate to write and complain. No malice or poor taste is ever intended in these family-friendly pages.

One of the more recent representative images of the hunt from the Pioneer Press. For a look at Winter Carnival button designs from past years, see Ron Young's excellent St. Paul Winter Carnival button collection or another keep-it-simple button index reminiscent of the earliest days of the Web.