David, in Boston, dials Carolyn in Ashland, Ore.

“I’ve got something,” he tells her. “Badlands.”

The boys are strapped in their car seats, and she and Mark are just leaving. “OK,” Carolyn says, thinking it’s just another hunch. “We’ll call you when we get back in an hour.”

Shortly after, David, has more: BADLANDSWROVRLK. He can’t wait. He leaves Mark and Carolyn voicemail, “I found it. I’m going. Want to come?”, and begins packing frantically.

How do I get myself from here to the Badlands? he thinks. Maybe I won’t drive it (Mapquest shows 1,800 miles, 28 hours). Instead, David buys a ticket, flies into Minneapolis the next morning, jumps into his rental car and drives.

Shortly before David leaves for Minneapolis, Mark and Carolyn get his last message and begin to have a serious conversation. Who should go? Katie, their 11-year-old and David’s goddaughter, whom they’ve just dropped off at camp? Not practical. All of them? Too expensive. Carolyn? Maybe. The conversation continues until 2:00 the next morning. Just before Mark hits the “purchase” button on a $1,000 plane ticket, Carolyn suggests using frequent flyer miles. She finds a ticket for 20,000 frequent flyer miles plus $5, one seat left. Carolyn says to Mark, “You should go.” She sends an e-mail to David: “Your best friend’s coming.”

Mark wraps up work details, flies into Rapid City, S.D., via Denver, and arranges to meet David at a hotel in Wall, S.D. After a close call with a buffalo herd enroute, Mark makes it to the hotel and waits for David, who is speeding 600 miles across half of Minnesota and much of South Dakota.

“Thanks for coming, Mark,” David says when he arrives. “I apologize in advance for potentially leading you on a wild goose chase.”

Mark shrugs it off and professes his faith in David’s work.

The two compare notes, pack up necessary items and head out toward Badlands National Park around 11:30 Monday night. A little over an hour later on the cloudy, moonless night, they reach the deserted White River Valley Overlook. Using the fairy map in their well-worn copies of “A Treasure’s Trove,” they find the area and see what appears to be “the tree,” for there are no others for a good half mile. They march toward it in the 50-degree drizzle with an electric camping lantern, a flashlight and a head lamp. Dodging dead limbs, they begin searching for the knothole where the sought-after token is supposed to be. After 10 minutes, they find nothing.

Geez, thinks David. Tell me I didn’t just drop everything and go 1,800 miles to find the wrong tree. This is going to feel really stupid.

“I’m going to climb the tree,” Mark says.

David strongly discourages him. After all, none of the other winners had to climb a tree to find the tokens, plus the author’s physique suggested that tree climbing was not in his repertoire. David was convinced that no one climbed the tree to hide a token so, therefore, they shouldn’t need to climb a tree to find it.

Mark ignores him and begins climbing, despite pain from a previously separated shoulder. He finds a comfortable place to stand and hold on, and looks around for knotholes. After about 20 seconds, his “REI special” headlamp shines on something. Just below him in a knothole is the unmistakable glint of a gold token.

“There it is,” Mark says, nonchalantly. “You should come up here and see it before we pull it out.”

Before Mark climbs down, David dials Carolyn on the cell phone and hands it up to Mark. “We found it,” Mark tells her as he stands over the token in the tree. An ecstatic Carolyn calls daughter Katie at camp to tell her they have found the beetle token.

“Mom,” Katie says, “you said it was a one-in-a-million chance.”

Carolyn replies, “But, I also said if anyone can do it, David can.”

The journey to the Badlands had its beginnings at Mudd in Arthur Campbell’s freshman chemistry class, where David Somers ’87 and Mark Moeglein ’87 met. They became best friends and shared great times as undergraduates. David, a mathematics major, was freshman class president and was ASHMC president as a junior, and Mark, an engineering major, was senior class president and co-president of the Outdoor Sports Program. Carolyn (Wetzel) Moeglein ’84, a mathematics major, was also active in ASHMC during her years at Mudd.

David’s deeds at Mudd are almost legendary: co-founder of the Four-Class Competition with Carl Krentz ’85; creator of an outdoor student-faculty gathering place (now the Hixon Court food cart); one of seven culprits who were almost expelled for moving survey control stakes during Case Dorm construction; a staunch advocate for vegetarian meals at Platt; and, above all, one of the ringleaders of the Caltech Cannon heist.

Mark was also one of the pranksters who stole the three-ton cannon over spring break 1986. “It was a glorious moment, followed by a big hassle over how to give it back,” says Mark. “David was the student body president at the time, so it was mostly his problem, but we still wouldn’t trade the memory for anything.”

That summer, both young men continued to have good fortune. Mark signed onto a commercial fishing boat in Alaska that paid deckhands a fixed share of the catch. He was lucky enough to find himself fishing the biggest run of salmon the area had ever seen. David turned a boring summer job into a $10,000 payoff by solving the 21 clues given in a radio station treasure hunt for a “missing case of Miller Lite.”

Treasure hunts and puzzles have been particularly appealing to David, who grew up working Martin Gardner’s Scientific American puzzles. David began to explore issues of artificial intelligence and robotics while at Mudd. At that time, the topics were handled by members of the Department of Biology, T.J. Mueller and HMC’s first biology professor William Purves. “Both T.J. and Bill nurtured my interest in these areas,” says David. “They encouraged me to explore questions of the mind and look at structure and models of visual processing, a sort of more mainstream realm of research at the time. T.J. and Bill profoundly influenced what I’m doing with my life nearly 20 years later. I feel that I owe them a huge intellectual debt. Today as a professor myself, I often think of them and try to ‘pay it forward’ by helping today’s students.”

David graduated from Mudd, grabbed his unicycle and headed for China on a Durfee Foundation scholarship with Louis Rossi ’88 and eight other Mudders, then, later, investigated vegetarianism and animal rights in England, Nepal and India on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. David earned a Ph.D. in cognitive and neural systems from Boston University (BU), worked as a researcher at MIT for seven years, then returned to BU to become assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Program in Neuroscience. He and his students—of which Ph.D. candidate Jascha Swisher ’99 is one—use functional MRI to study perceptual and attentional mechanisms in the human brain. David also holds an appointment in radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Mark left Mudd and became an engineer at TRW. He and Carolyn, then a Pacific Bell engineer, began dating after reuniting at the 1988 HMC Alumni Weekend. They were married in 1991 and made their home in the San Francisco Bay area where Carolyn worked as a financial analyst for Pac Bell and Mark worked for SRI International. Mark later joined SnapTrack, a wireless location technology company (he was its second employee in 1996). After SnapTrack was purchased by Qualcomm in 2000, Carolyn left PacBell to stay home with the kids, and the family moved to Ashland, Ore., where they built their dream home. Mark still works for Qualcomm as an engineer, mostly from his home office.

The best friends served as each other’s best men (David is now divorced) and each had three children, with David becoming godfather to Mark’s first child, Katie. And even though 3,000 miles separate them, David and Mark have kept in touch by phone, e-mail and through regular family vacations together. It was David who bought “A Treasure’s Trove” by Michael Stadther for Katie’s birthday in February 2005 after enjoying reading it and sharing the book’s clues and solutions with his own girls, Juliana, 10, Anika, 8, and Ellie, 6. The book is a classic fairy tale that contains clues among its pages to the locations of 12 tokens, redeemable for 12 one-of-a-kind jewels, inspired by the story’s crystallized forest creatures. The combined value of the jewels is over $1 million.

Katie finished reading the book the first day, says Mark. She and her brothers, Karl, 7, and even Adam, 2, “poured over the pages with Carolyn, held them up to the bathroom mirror and brainstormed on what the clues might be. There were many phone calls and e-mails from Boston to Ashland discussing the story,” he says.

Around Memorial Day 2005, the first token was found. All tokens are hidden in knotholes of trees located on publicly accessible land, such as city, state or national parks. It became clear to David that the treasure hunt was legitimate, and his interest peaked. The cognitive scientist (David), logic puzzle lover (Carolyn) and Scrabble fan (Mark) decided to pick up the investigative pace. Within weeks of the first token’s discovery, nine of the 12 tokens had been found. “We were racing to catch up,” says David.

By the end of June, the eleventh token had been found. Mark and Carolyn were by this time concentrating on the “Wall of Blocks” illustration in which the beetle puzzle was encoded and were following David’s clues as best they could. “He kept giving us hints and we’d go back and continue taking his lead,” Carolyn says. “But David was doing the hard work.”

After reviewing the previous 11 prize clues, David felt he had a handle on the author’s strategy. The token’s location was encoded using three images from the book: a primary puzzle page, a drop cap letter illustration, and an illustration of the tree in which the token was hidden. The difficulty with the particular illustration they were working with, David says, was that there was a lot in the illustration. Nevertheless, this puzzle was one which David was uniquely qualified to solve.

Purves believes David had an edge solving the “Treasure Trove” puzzle because of his mathematics and computer science background, “which meant it was child’s play for him to cut through those bazillion possibilities,” says Purves. “Because he’s a cognitive scientist, he’s trained to think about thought and things like that. The whole science, engineering, mathematics thing was clearly relevant to what he did.”

David says, “I tried to stay at a high level of problem solving—why does this picture look like this?—and to consider different strategies. Why did the author use a wall of children’s blocks? There’s not actually any relevance in the story, so it’s not just illustrating something in the story. He chose to do this for some reason. Maybe he’s got some trick where he’s going to use how things look as a way to keep you from seeing how things actually are.”

David’s background in visual perception was cranked into high gear. He began by determining which visual components held the “code of 5,” or Polybius code, in which letters are encoded as pairs of digits between 1 and 5. Using a 5 by 5 checkerboard of letters (with one letter excluded, in this case Q, which appears nowhere in the book) he used pairs of digits to index the letters. At first, he thought the code was hidden in the five different colors used on the blocks and their trim.

“After trying some things with the colors, I said it has to be the wood grains because they don’t match up. Whatever is here wasn’t done randomly.”

David called the Moegleins and told them about his wood grain hunch on Saturday. Instead of viewing the 2-D form of the wood grains, he tried looking at them as parts of 3-D objects. On Sunday morning, his wood grain hunch led to the mapping of the eight block face types into 5 categories. He came up with a sequencing by reading the block faces as one reads a book, left to right, top to bottom. However, since there was no key as to how to map a particular wood grain pattern to a particular digit, he assigned an intermediate code then built a small program to generate the 480 plausible string combinations. Four hundred seventy-nine of them were nonsensical, but one—the 246th on the search list—read BADLANDSWROVRLK. After a quick search on Google, David translated this into Badlands National Park, White River Valley Overlook.

“It was the biggest ‘a-ha’ moment I’ve had,” says David. “I’ve had some good ones in science but basically in a span of 15 minutes, I went from having no clue where this thing was other than somewhere in the lower 48 states, to, oh, I know where this thing is within 100 yards. And, I know that when I get there, I’m going to find it within 15 minutes. That was a pretty breathtaking leap of insight.”

For Mark and Carolyn it was a leap of faith to drop everything for three days and trust David’s theory. But Mark said he’s used to such things when it comes to David (the Caltech Cannon caper being a good example). “I always end up going along because I support him. He’s not used to having people completely trust his results. I’m the guy who actually believes in him, like his trusty sidekick.” Carolyn laughs.

It’s definitely been fun all around for the three Mudders and their kids, who have been enthused and inspired by the experience. David took his daughters to present the token to Stadther during a book signing in Boston, and the Moegleins got to speak with the author by phone. David’s girls also got to hold the $54,000 beetle whose wings open to reveal a nine-carat tanzanite gem surrounded by 12 colorless diamonds, and Katie and her brothers appeared on local Oregon TV.

At the end of the treasure hunt, now scheduled for Jan. 1, 2008, David, Mark and Carolyn will claim the jeweled beetle and probably hang onto it for awhile, maybe even joining with other winners to share the jewels with a museum. All say the best part has not been the treasure, but the fact that friends were able to share this remarkable experience.

“It was the look on our children’s faces when they realized what we had all accomplished together,” says Mark of his favorite memory. Caroline adds that the two families are planning a trip to the Badlands. “Treasure hunts are so much more exciting through a child’s eyes.”

“It’s been a blast,” says David. “And, really, how often in life do you get to share an adventure with your kids and your best friend and your best friend’s family? It’s just been terrific. Getting to do this with an old friend from Mudd. I feel like I’m a kid again.”

For puzzle solving details, see David Somers’ website.