CoolerCrew.com - Cooler Crew -- A History

You Dig?

Cooler Crew -- A History

by Terry Valentine

During the 1990’s, the St Paul Pioneer Press opened online discussion forums. These forums were called Water Coolers. The forums had discussion topics related to sports, politics, news, and current events. Each year, the Pioneer Planet – the online section of the Pioneer Press – opened a discussion forum as a media for hunters to discuss the clues for the Winter Carnival Medallion Hunt.

During the earlier years, one might find a few hundred posts during the hunt. As more hunters had computers, those numbers jumped. From 1997 to 1998, the number of posts increased from the hundreds to the 5-digit thousands. It was during the 1998 hunt the Cooler Crew was born.

The community spirit and teamwork displayed in the Pioneer Press Medallion Hunt thread was inspiring. The group of hunters found themselves at the end of a hunt not wanting to let go of new friendships and the camaraderie found on the Water Cooler board. The idea emerged to do what anyone would do in the middle of winter in Minnesota. A picnic in Cherokee was planned - the first Rehash Bash!

Among the potato salad, sloppy Joe medallions, coffee and desserts, the Pioneer Planet Water Cooler Crew met face to face on a chilly, Sunday, February afternoon. Representatives from the Pioneer Planet were there to record this phenomenon and Greg Sax, a native St. Paulite, then residing in Milwaukee, arranged to have the first “You Dig?” buttons available.

This group then decided it should have a website of it’s own. The Pioneer Planet agreed to sponsor a website, Greg Sax agreed to volunteer his time as webmaster and all that was now needed was a URL for this new site! After much discussion, a decision was reached. www.coolercrew.com would be the site and this online community would be known as the Cooler Crew!

The rest of the history can be found woven among each year’s clues, images and stories at this website.

In 2002, Knight-Ridder, the owners of the Pioneer Press, decided to change the format and get rid of the discussion forums that had brought this group of hunters together. At that same time, the sponsoring of the website was dropped. The Water Coolers were gone.

But the spirit of the Cooler Crew was bigger than Knight-Ridder. A new place for online discussions was found and a new home for the coolercrew.com site was arranged. Once we had the release of the domain name, the new webmasters, Ares, Marley King and Artemis the Huntress, put the website back online. Knight-Ridder took the Water Cooler away, but did not take the Cooler out of the Crew.

The Cooler Crew is an online community made up of super folks with a commonality that involves digging in parks in the dead of the winter and because we have this obsession in common, we find other parts of us that have commonality too. Please join us!

Contributions encouraged

This page was last modified on Oct 12 2005 3:16PM .

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.