Distilled from every solved checkpoint in the knowledge base: 2021 QR4, 2022 QR2/QR4 (recollections only), 2023 QR1–8, and 2024 QR1–8. There are no 2025 records. 2021 and 2022 are thin, so most patterns below come from 2023 and 2024.

1. Recurring clue formats

Format	Examples	Notes
Video / Street View geolocation	2023 QR1, 2024 QR1
Video with signal hidden in small details	2023 QR2 (Morse lantern, braille in photos), 2024 QR3 (axe watermark, four place names, Sherlock quotes)	Most of the video's runtime is filler. The signal sits in a corner or a frame.
Image with edited or hidden content	2024 QR2 (Jordan photo, score cards changed), 2022 QR4 (billboard overlay), 2024 QR8 (Frost Box images overlaid as red/green 3D), 2024 QR7 (photo cards with a digit removed)	Compare against the original image. Overlay pairs of images.
Letter/number codes → digits → coordinates	2021 QR4, 2023 QR4, 2024 QR2	See §2.
Book / Ottendorf cipher	2023 QR1/QR8 (Art of War, chapter.paragraph.word), 2023 QR4 (Monte Cristo movie script, word offsets), 2024 QR4 (Bill of Rights, amendment + letter position), 2021 Junior Hunt (Harry Potter, reused in 2024 QR6)	Identifying the source text is the hard part. The hint comes from shape (2023 QR4 King shape), a hint email (2024 QR4 "old, important document"), or a prop from an earlier QR (2023 QR8: Art of War on the QR7 escape-room table).
Classical cipher chains	2023 QR6 (A1Z26 → Caesar +3 → reverse → Instagram → Atbash → Vigenère)	Layers stack. Each layer's output has to be readable before you move on.
Crossword with an embedded instruction	2024 QR5	The answers form a sentence. Some answers say what to ignore (2024 QR5: "Ignore intensely painful through orange veggie"). Color coding and clue numbers matter. The grid itself becomes a map overlay.
Online game	2023 QR3 (Roblox obby), 2023 QR5 (TreasureGuns), 2024 QR6 (QRSlayer on itch.io + 360° murder-mystery tour), 2024 QR7 (Roblox, billboard at the end)	The end screen gives a place or a passphrase. Persistence beats cleverness here. 2024 QR7's official hint: pay a niece or nephew $20. Past games live in the UTH site arcade. The 2023 solve doc notes the game link may be reused.
Website source / site pages	2023 QR8 (hidden `var riddle` + `console.log(url/clueAnswer + riddleAnswer)`), 2024 QR3 (video link in page code before release), 2024 QR6 (About page video at 75 s = rhenium), 2024 QR8 (CSS class holding an imgur URL, applied only for team "Henry Walton Jones")	Inspect the clue page, the leaderboard and the JS bundle. Load all leaderboard rows before Ctrl+F (2024 QR8).
Organizers' social media	2023 QR6 (32nd posts on Dave's and John's Instagram, edited captions), 2023 QR7 (John's eclipse story)	Old posts can be edited mid-hunt to plant clues.
Riddle/poem directions	2023 QR7 (street-grid walking poem), 2023 QR8 step 3 (one digit per riddle line)	Each line maps to one step or one digit. Some lines are declared filler ("This line means zip").
Sponsor reference / sponsor webpage	2022 QR2, 2023 QR2, 2024 QR5 (Bulldog dumpster), 2024 QR7 (password "Magellan")	See §3.

2. How locations are encoded

Concatenated digits split as decimal degrees. Utah coordinates start 40/41 and -111/-112. Solvers in 2024 QR2 found the split point by looking for 111. Examples: 2021 QR4 (40613527 / 111785286), 2023 QR4 (41069472111889351), 2024 QR2 (1765776917903327 × 23 = 40612869111776521).
Digits come from arithmetic between two sources: a multiplier taken from the image (Jordan's 23, 2024 QR2).
Number words / homophones: "Won" = 1, "For" = 4, "To" = 2, "Oh" = 0 (2023 QR4).
Plaintext place names or instructions: "drycreeksixkfeetbehindthepost" (2023 QR6), "GO TO EL MEXSAL. BRING SOCKS." (2024 QR4), in-game "go to Crazy Corn Maze" (2023 QR3).
Map geometry: line intersection of four named places (2024 QR3, from the Sherlock Holmes four-sites scene), crossword squares = city blocks overlaid on Ogden (2024 QR5), street-grid walking directions (2023 QR7), paces from a landmark (2024 QR6 "100 paces that way").
Elevation or description: "six k feet behind the post" (2023 QR6).
Geolocation of an image (QR1 tradition): 2023 QR1, 2024 QR1.
Phone numbers instead of places (finales): last digits of photo-sphere latitudes → (385) 645-5725, then riddle digits → 801-784-3986 (2023 QR8). "Call 4336200473" (2024 QR8).

3. Where plaques end up

Trails (hike required): Ferguson Canyon (2021 QR4, 2024 QR2: same canyon reused), Adams Canyon, Layton (2023 QR4, on a fallen tree off a side path), Dry Creek, Alpine (2023 QR6, on a tree up a dirt hill). Plaques sit just off the trail: on fallen logs, behind boulders, on trees, about 5 ft off the path.

Open land / shoreline / roadside: Antelope Island causeway lot rocks (2023 QR1), Utah Lake shore at Vineyard (2024 QR1), Tintic Railroad Tunnel (2023 QR2), old rail tracks in Draper (2024 QR6, on a tie at ground level, partly under brush).

Businesses, usually sponsors or partners: Crazy Corn Maze (2023 QR3), Bloom Studios room 113 (2023 QR5), a Gateway pop-up escape room (2023 QR7), Axe N Smash Layton (2024 QR3), El Mexsal → Hang Time (2024 QR4), a Bulldog-brand dumpster behind Harajuku (2024 QR5), SL County Animal Services as a waypoint (2024 QR6), a Trolley Square escape room (2024 QR7).

Patterns:

Sponsors are built into the solve, not just credited: the sponsor's product (Bulldog dumpster, 2024 QR5), the sponsor as a password (2024 QR7), sponsor cards (2024 QR6 Suba Bleu / Mark Miller Subaru), sponsor images (2024 QR8 Frost Box).
Business stops often require an action: a secret phrase at the desk (2023 QR5 "stone bear"), a physical challenge (axe bullseye 2024 QR3, slackline 2024 QR4), an on-site escape room (2023 QR7, 2024 QR7), claw-machine tokens (2024 QR4), downloading a file to USB (2023 QR5).
Business hours matter: 2023 QR3 (plaque moved outside after weather).
Locations get reused: Ferguson Canyon (2021 QR4 → 2024 QR2), the Draper tracks (2021 Junior → 2024 QR6), Trolley Square's "same entry door as last year" (2024 QR7), the Blokus prop "SEVEN DIGIT CODE BUT NO BLOKUS" (2023 QR7 and 2024 QR7). Assuming an old spot couldn't be reused was listed as a red herring in 2024 QR6.
Geographic range seen: Harrisville/Ogden (2024 QR5) south to Elberta/Eureka (2023 QR2), with Antelope Island and Utah Lake at the edges. Spots north of Brigham City and Ephraim came up as out of bounds (2024 QR8, 2024 QR5).
Not every QR has a plaque: 2023 QR5 (QR recovered from a .bin file), 2023 QR8 and 2024 QR8 (phone calls).

4. Plaque questions vs. the solve

Question type	Examples
"What city are you in?"	2023 QR1 Syracuse, 2024 QR1 Vineyard, 2024 QR3 Layton, 2024 QR6 Draper
Trail name	2023 QR4 "Adam's Canyon Trail", 2024 QR2 "Ferguson"
Something visible on site	2023 QR2 body of water to the NE (Utah Lake), 2024 QR4 "What did you cross?" (slackline), 2024 QR5 nearest restaurant (Harajuku)
Callback to the solve path (proves you solved it rather than followed a leak)	2023 QR3 encoding in the previous QR's video (braille), 2023 QR6 what Dave's wife stands next to in the oars reel (crib), 2023 QR7 smallest of the four books used (Steppenwolf), 2024 QR7 escape-room door code (203467)

Notes: capitalization mattered (2023 QR7). Common alternate spellings were accepted (2023 QR4 apostrophe). Several stops required selfies at every physical location, not just the plaque (2024 QR4, 2023 QR7). Keep notes on every intermediate answer, since a later plaque may ask for one.

5. Common red herrings

Decoys planted by the organizers

Self-labelled taunts: base64 "This is not a clue." and green pixels spelling "ThisIsNotAClue" (2024 QR8).
Whole blocks of content to ignore: the big billboard's letters (2022 QR4), the crossword span 27–71 (2024 QR5), the About-page numbers (2024 QR6, which the official hints said were unrelated), unused board games (2023 QR7), "This line means zip" (2023 QR7), the many props in escape rooms (2024 QR7).
Timed social-media decoys: two 30-second Instagram stories on drop day (2023 QR6).

Theme pulling you to the wrong medium or text

The obvious source text is often the wrong edition: novel vs. movie script (2023 QR4), Constitution vs. Bill of Rights (2024 QR4). Spoken content (Livingston line in 2024 QR1) was chased with no payoff.
Treating musical notation literally as chords (2024 QR4) when it only meant "count note names from C".

Video and file artifacts

Glitch frames, compression noise, audio spectra and captions (2024 QR3): the organizers said "No" when asked if the glitches were intentional.
File names and base64 tails ("Z", "9k=") (2024 QR2, 2024 QR4). Typos are not clues (2024 QR5 "ACCROSS", stated by John).
Steganography tools on clue images found nothing in 2024 QR2, QR5 and QR8. Aperisolve's "common password" list is other users' inputs (2024 QR6).

Word association to places

2023 QR7 accumulated dozens of wrong SLC/Ogden/Daybreak sites from loose readings. Same-name ambiguity: Liberty Park SLC vs. Ogden (2024 QR5), Jordan → West Jordan (2024 QR2).
Organizers sometimes publicly rule places out: "the plaque is not at the shelter" (2024 QR6).

Human noise

Business staff may not know about the hunt (2024 QR4 El Mexsal employee caused a correct solver to post it as "wrong"; 2024 QR3 staff said "definitely maybe").
Leaks and trolls: the keypad photo from a kicked member (2023 QR7), leaked solves via a big Discord voice chat (2024 QR5).

Finale-specific

Over-reading riddle lines: merging two lines into one digit, or treating the name line as a digit (2023 QR8 "Harry Houdini"). Brute-force dialing 400+ numbers never hit (2023 QR8). Skip patterns containing 911.

6. Difficulty across a hunt

QR1 is the easiest and is traditionally Street View geolocation. 2024 QR1 was found about 75 minutes after kickoff.
Early to middle QRs (2–4) move to coordinate ciphers, image puzzles and video puzzles. Some become unsolvable without the weekly/Friday hint email (2024 QR4: no progress in four days before the hint). The hint usually names the missing ingredient ("music theory and an old, important document", "each block = city block").
Middle to late QRs (5–7) are multi-stage: game → business → escape room → safe. Several on-site sub-codes. Physical tasks.
Final (QR8) is an emailed clue after selfie submission, described by the organizers as "notorious for being difficult" (2023 QR8) or having "a reputation of being difficult" (2024 QR8). There is no plaque, the answer is a phone number, it has several steps, and it reuses props and keywords from earlier QRs: Art of War from the QR7 room (2023 QR8), Contact from the QR7 room plus the "rhenium" keyword from QR6/7 (2024 QR8). The same seven-triplet image appears in both the 2023 QR1 and 2023 QR8 records.
Timing mechanics: scanning starts a cooldown before the next clue (24 h in 2024 QR2, 48 h in 2024 QR4). First-scan prizes ($1k/$2k). The final arrives about 48 h after selfies.
Solvers from 2023 QR6 and 2024 QR3 found they could shortcut the intended path (Vigenère brute force, the axe watermark plus the bullseye badge icon). The badge icon gave away 2024 QR3 (a target).

7. Organizer fingerprints

Pop culture and their own favorites: Sherlock Holmes 2009 (2024 QR3), Indiana Jones / Contact (2024 QR8), Monte Cristo (2023 QR4), Almost Famous (2023 QR8).
Personal references: Dave's and John's Instagram (2023 QR6), a sticker of Dave's face on the door (2023 QR7), crossword answers BROMANCE / REEL / LEHI (2024 QR5).
Callbacks to past hunts: "bear made of stone" (2023 QR5), reused locations, "rhenium" carried across 2024 QR6 → QR7 → QR8.
Puns that are literal instructions: "Ex marks the spot", "as the crow flies", "Insta thirty-second", "two dashes" = hyphens.
Verify-as-you-go design: the murder game allows unlimited guesses (2024 QR6).

8. Step-by-step solving checklist

Collect every surface: clue page text, page source/JS, image files (full resolution), video + description + title, email body and source, the leaderboard, and organizers' and sponsors' Instagram.
If it's QR1, start with Street View. Match vegetation, road markings and mountains.
Separate signal from flavor. Look for taunts ("This is not a clue") and declared-filler lines, and for small anomalies: watermarks, edited numbers, corner symbols, edited captions.
Find the number source(s) and test arithmetic between them (concatenate, multiply). Check whether the results are clean single digits or A1Z26 letters.
Test the coordinate split: does a digit string contain 40/41 … 111/112? Plot it. Also try reading the result as a plaintext place name or a phone number.
For a book cipher, identify the exact text: look at shape, theme, hint wording and props from earlier QRs. Try movie scripts and sub-documents (amendments, chapters), not just the obvious book.
For layered ciphers, verify that each layer produces readable text before moving on (2023 QR6).
For crosswords, solve fully, read the answers in clue-number order as a sentence, look for "ignore X through Y" instructions, use the colors, and consider the grid as a map overlay.
For games, just finish them. Read the end screen and zoom out for billboards (2024 QR7).
Check the website: hidden variables, CSS classes with URLs, conditional logic on team names, and the About page.
Read the weekly hint email word by word when it arrives. It usually names the missing piece.
Before driving: check business hours, whether the clue has a secret phrase, required selfies, and whether you need a USB drive, flashlight or socks.
On site: plaques sit just off trails (logs, trees, rocks, ground-level ties) or inside venues (back rooms, safes, dumpsters). Expect on-site codes. Bring notes of every intermediate answer for callback plaque questions.
For the final: expect several steps and a phone number. Reread earlier QRs' props and keywords. Treat each riddle line as one digit and don't merge lines. Load all leaderboard rows before searching.
Discount staff denials, leaks, glitch frames, typos and file names, unless something independent confirms them.