Professor Somers, Treasure Hunter

Around 1 a.m., David Somers stepped out of his rental car and unloaded his gear. Equipped with a hanging lantern and treasure map, the 40-year-old and his best friend marched into the starless night. When they returned from the Badlands of South Dakota, they would be $54,000 richer.

Not bad for a Boston University psychology professor and single parent of three.

What they found in the Badlands was a golden token, redeemable for a jeweled rhinoceros beetle.

This epic quest began with a book, A Treasure’s Trove by Michael Stadther. The 100-page novel reads like a children’s book, but hidden within its rich illustrations lay the clues to 12 tokens scattered throughout the United States. Whoever cracked the codes could redeem the tokens for jeweled figures fashioned after characters in the book, a combined worth of more than $1 million.

Somers said he bought the book not for the fortune, but for his family. “I often tell my daughters, “OK, let’s turn off the TV and sit down together and solve some puzzles,” he said.

The genius of the book, Somers said, rests in its range of material. He found something suitable for each of his daughters. Ellie, 6, enjoyed the story; Anika, 8, deciphered one page’s Morse Code message; and Juliana, 10, tackled some of the book’s more difficult problems.

“At first it was just fun, but after a while I thought, ‘oh jeez, I think I can solve this.'”

Around Memorial Day, news that the first token had been recovered spread throughout internet fan sites. This initial push started the dominos falling and by July, only one token remained hidden, Somers remembered.

“I had to complete my tenure dossier, but I said, ‘hey, if in two weeks no one has found the last token, I’m going to reward myself and see if I can solve it,” he said. “There was a little pressure. My oldest daughter brought the book into school and told everyone that I was going to get one of the jewels. They all assumed I’d be able to do it.”

* * *

Physically excited about explaining the puzzle, Somers dug through a pile of papers. He seemed comfortable in his cluttered office, lined with pictures of him climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, smiling at the base camp of Everest and playing with his three daughters.

He finally uncovered his copy of “A Treasure’s Trove.” The paper-back’s edges are worn and white. As he opened its pages, the spine bent into familiar creases.

“The text is more or less irrelevant,” Somers said. “Everything is in the pictures. That’s the great thing. No super computer can see what a four-year-old can spot with her naked eye.”

He turned to page 63. A pattern of lettered blocks filled the borders. The blocks themselves spell out the initial clue: “Reveals the name where the treasures abide.”

“But the real trick is harder to spot,” he said. “You have to look at the wood grains of the blocks.”

To correctly decipher the location of the token, Somers followed a Polybius Code, in which two symbols equal one letter. The problem was:

Which symbols were important?

To help him crack the wood grain code, Somers created a computer program to generate all the possibilities – all 480 of them.

Somers scrolled through the 16 pages of gibberish for 45 minutes, finding nothing but random jumbles of letters. Finally, he found it.

“BADLANDSWROVRLK.”

The BADLANDS in South Dakota matched the locations of the other 11 tokens, which were all tucked into the knotholes of trees in public parks. He guessed “OVRLK” meant “overlook,” another common hiding spot among the found tokens. All that stood between him and his prize was “WR.”

“I immediately got on to Google,” he said. “There are 13 overlooks in the Badlands National Park, but only one named White River Overlook.” All he had was 15 letters, but Somers said he knew he had it.

“I knew this had to be it,” he said. “Sure, there’s a saying that monkeys typing at a typewriter would eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare, but I read somewhere that it would take 600,000 monkey hours to match even eight characters. So this was too close to be a mistake.”

He grabbed the phone. First, he called his daughters, who were at their mother’s. Somers then dialed his best friend, Oregon engineer Mark Moeglein, and yelled, “I got Badlands!”

“I trusted him,” Moeglein said. “Of course, I did swindle a few details out of him before I was willing to just head out the door.”

Somers said within 15 minutes, he was on Hotwire.com purchasing plane tickets.

The first flight Somers could find landed in Minneapolis, nearly 600 miles away from the Badlands. But immediacy was key.

“I raced to the airport,” Somers said. “I just barely made it through the security check in time. And when I finally got on the plane, it just sat there. The pilot eventually got on the intercom and said, ‘we’re experiencing some weather delays, I guess it just isn’t our lucky day.’ “‘But it is my lucky day,'” Somers yelled. “I just couldn’t believe it. But we got to the Badlands after midnight, so I guess the next day was my lucky day.”

Once the plane touched down, Somers rented a car and sped 95 miles per hour toward South Dakota.

“At one point on the highway, this van of students passed me,” Somers said. “Now I was going pretty fast already, but decided to pass them. Then they passed me and paranoia started to set in. ‘They know where it is,’ I thought. ‘They’re trying to get there before me.'”

His fears were false, but he raced through the entire trip not knowing if another treasure hunter had already snatched the prize.

Meeting at a hotel in South Dakota around 11 p.m., Somers and Moeglein loaded up a car and headed into the Badlands. Clouds obscured the stars, leaving the night dark and still.

“It was colder than we expected,” Moeglein said. “Especially colder than David expected. It was summer, so he showed up in shorts and a t-shirt. But it was somewhere in the low 50s.”

Arriving at the Badlands after midnight, the two consulted the book for further directions. The wall of blocks led them to the national park, but two other pages held the token’s true location. Worked into one design, an illustrated fairy pointed to a thin black line laced in between a mass of green vines.

“Without knowing where to look, the line meant nothing,” Somers said. “But that black line that the fairy is pointing at perfectly matches one of the roads in the Badlands. She pointed right at the tree.”

The author even drew a picture of the tree on a later page, but Somers joked that the final clue was probably not necessary.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a picture of the Badlands, but there really aren’t any trees,” he said. “When we got to the site, there was exactly one tree for half a mile.”

But standing at the foot of the tree, they hit a dead end.

“We were just poking around in the dark,” Somers said. “We knew the token had to be in one of the knotholes, but we we’re finding anything.” Moeglein grew frustrated. All the knotholes they found were empty, so he decided to climb the tree.

“In the heat of the moment, I forgot that I had separated my shoulder and recently had surgery to reconstruct it,” Moeglein said. “I climbed up maybe eight or nine feet into the air and looked down. ‘Oh, there it is.'”

Tucked into the curve of the tree, a little glitter of light reflected off Moeglein’s flashlight. At first, neither friend wanted to touch the golden token.

“I think Mark felt was he wasn’t worthy of touching it,” Somers said. “We took pictures of it and called home. I would like to say we were jumping around, but it was a pretty low-key moment. It was so late that we couldn’t even find a place to buy a bottle of champagne.”

Juliana, Somers’ oldest daughter, said the jeweled beetle her father received was even better than she expected.

“It was really pretty,” she said. “It had a lot of blue and gold. And when you pushed its horns together the wings open and you can see the jewel.”

The gem hidden under the moveable 18-karat gold wings is a nine-carat tanzanite encircled by 12 diamonds.

While proud of his prize, Somers suggested that anyone could have solved this puzzle and experienced the same adventure. He just got to it first.

“I think there is a little Indiana Jones in every professor,” he said. “It’s just a question of how much of it comes out.”