Six Questions with Julie-ann Nydegger and Her Quest for the Spiral Horn of The Unicornis Manuscripts

Julie-ann Nydegger’s perseverance, courage, dedication, and passion towards the quest for the silver bound Spiral Horn is a true inspiration.  Overcoming challenges and embracing unexpected outcomes, she epitomizes what it means to be an explorer.  Her story touches the heart.  It encourages others to dream on, and to believe that no matter what treasure a person seeks, it is out there to be found in one form or another.

When Julie-ann first shared her adventure with me, I couldn’t help but be captivated. She conveyed all that I felt the search for the treasured Horn of The Unicornis Manuscipts is and should be.  Her incredible journey reminded me of a comment made from the Grail researcher, Duncan Burden.  He spoke about Grail-questing knights, “The treasure didn’t fall to their feet, some accounts speak of decades of suffering and searching.”  He then asks while relating to current seekers, “How could you feel the deep awesome sensation if it was passed to you as easily as a cup of coffee?  Would you treasure it as much?”

Deciding to take on the challenge, Julie-ann dared to experience the absolute thrills that only a quest can give. I am sure you will enjoy her account as much as I did, as it gives such a urge to be brave and do the extraordinary.

 

• 1Q) The Unicornis Manuscripts by Michael Green was first published in 1983.  When and how did you first hear about his wondrous tale and the daring quest for the Silver Bound Spiral Horn of which it contained?

I discovered the Unicornis book in 1986 when I was ten years old.  I was out to dinner with my parents and some friends in Tampa, FL, and saw this store that I could only describe as magical. It was an eclectic shop full of pewter dragons and colorful stones, and incense wafting through the air. On the top of a display case was the Unicornis book, so high I couldn’t reach it, even when I stood on my tippy-toes. How symbolic that would be, looking back years later!

The shopkeeper got the book down for me and I was overwhelmed by the images. I didn’t know what it was about, of course, but all my ten-year-old self knew that it was REAL…and I had to have this book! I handed it back to the shopkeeper and promised I’d be back after dinner. My head was swirling with thoughts of, what if someone saw me looking at it and decided to buy it first? There was only one copy! Dinner was agony, and at some point I told my mother I saw a book in that store that I really liked and it had unicorns in it. I begged her to please come to the store with me after dinner so I could show her the book. After dinner, I realized that some of the stores were closing, and the shopkeeper was closing the gate on the storefront when I ran up and begged him for the book. My mother flipped through the pages quickly, then looked at the price. “You have to get at least a B on your math test on Thursday, if you want this” she said. I would have agreed to plant daisies on the moon at that point.

I remember walking to the parking garage with the book….my treasure….in an oversized gold bag. The quest had begun with a struggle and a victory. Struggle would prove to be my constant companion on the journey to find the Horn, and victory would be a rare, fleeting visitor. I remember going home, locking the door to my room and reading the whole book, only to realize that this was the answer I’d been searching for. At ten years old, I already was realizing that the magical, mysterious and wonderful things in my favorite stories and movies were all “just stories” as my friends would say. But I wanted to believe so badly that this world had a shred of magic in it.

It seemed like once there had to have been a time when all of those great stories actually happened, or something similar to them. Or, were all of the legends and tales just mankind’s way of filling a void of something that ought to have been here, but never was? The Unicornis Manuscript talked about the four ages, and this explained what I was trying to understand about the way my ten year old mind thought of the world. It explained that once, the things we now consider “magical” and mythical, roamed freely among us, until we changed and we changed the world, and drove the magical further and further away across unseen boundaries, until we could no longer remember what had been real, and what we had created in our imaginations.

 

• 2Q) Before discovering the location of the Great Stone that marked spot of the buried Spiral Horn, had you searched any other areas or places?  Did you ever feel like giving up, or feel you might never decipher where the Horn lay buried?

Before setting out on the first expedition to find the Horn in 2008, I had not seriously searched any other place. At the time of my first journey to the actual spot, I had been wrestling with finding the answer to the Prophecy for 22 years. In that time, I went through high school, college and started my career. I read dozens of books on Celtic symbols, Arthurian legend, gnosticism and the early church, cosmography, and took seven years of Latin in middle and high school so I could squeeze a bit more meaning out of the text. In college I went to a school on a mountain top, where I could prepare my mind and body for the journey I was still hoping to take some day. I studied philosophy, history, astronomy and geology, all with the intention of hoping that something would click, and I’d realize the answer to the Riddle.

It was so frustrating. I scoured the basement of the library at college in the oldest books looking for clues about a cryptic symbol here, or a phrase there, that appeared in the Manuscript. The quest, and the search for the Truth was constantly on my mind. I wasn’t interested in the things the other college kids were, I used college like a monastic retreat to learn, reflect and prepare. Many times I felt like giving up altogether though.  I kept a leather-bound notebook full of scribblings and notes, and at one point, after college, when I was feeling lost, depressed and totally without direction in the world I was thrown into, I threw all of my notes into the fireplace. But it wasn’t over. I watched it all burn and it wasn’t going away. In fact, I realized I’d just presented a burnt offering to the Quest itself. So I started over.

I sought relief by fishing every day for a whole year while trying to figure things out after college. I saw a small airplane fly over one day and decided that might help my perspective. Finally, I’d found some direction in life. I started flying lessons with no real goal in mind, but a year later I was working as a flight instructor and after four years, I was looking to move on to bigger things. I moved to St. Louis to fly Learjets for a company that flew all over the western hemisphere. I figured this was an excellent opportunity to scout potential places that the Horn might be.  Of course I was always on-call while on the road, with no real time to go on an actual expedition, but I could survey the surroundings by car on overnight trips and decide whether I should research the local area further. We went to northern Canada, the Pacific Northwest, National Parks, the jagged peaks of Mexico, volcanic islands of the Caribbean, the unforgiving forests of South America and everywhere in between. I would often look down from 43,000 feet and wonder if I was flying over the spot I was searching for,  at that very moment. I was sure that I must have, after so many years of criss-crossing North and South America.

I decided that I would either discover the answer to the Riddle, or die trying, and I was content in that decision. I would never burn my notes again. As I watched the world become more and more disillusioned, I pressed on with my personal search for Truth. I had to find that one thing that drew me into that store when I was 10 years old.  How many others, I wondered, were sharing my same quest? What if it had already been found? I couldn’t think about that.  When I was sixteen, for my birthday I wanted a sword. Not my driver’s license or a weekend party. I wanted a four foot long, steel and pewter sword. It was almost too heavy for me to handle at all. I named it “Ex Tenebris” or, “Out of Darkness” as a salute the first line of the Prophecy, “In tenebris” or Into Darkness, as the riddle goes. It was appropriate. This task, which was seemingly too big for me to undertake, will be undertaken, and I will grow around the heaviness and weight of it all, and learn how to use it. That sword still hangs on my wall in a special place.

 

• 3Q) Without revealing the Horn’s exact whereabouts (because others may still want to discover and feel it for themselves), will you tell us about your adventure to, and at, the Great Stone. What circumstances might have taken you there, and how remarkable was it to be there looking for the Spiral Horn?

This is a long answer… but it’s also the heart and soul of my story of my three journeys to the place where the Horn was buried. In 2008, I was living in St. Louis and flying as a Captain for a wonderful company in their brand new Learjet. Life was great. I just bought my first house and things seemed to be finally coming together. The internet had developed into an interesting place in the few years prior, and I’d discovered there was a large community of “treasure hunters” out there looking for all sorts of things that I had no idea even existed!  I was almost afraid to research the Unicornis quest, for fear of discovering that someone  had found it, and my efforts were for nothing. But everywhere I looked, there was mystery, “unsolved” said the status of many of the treasure forums. Much speculation, but no definitive answer! What if it was still out there? I’d gotten lazy in the years past, getting settled in my job and the new house. I’d started to drift from the mission, in other word. I remember creating a file folder on my computer and calling it “The Horn Quest” and using it much in the same way that I used my old leather-bound notebook. I would use the internet the way I used libraries in the past, and I would once again scout the places I travelled to, to see if any of them gave me a “feeling.” I must say, I had no idea where I should be looking, even then! There was one area though, that seemed right to me, but I didn’t know why. There were other places that made much more sense. But one area kept bringing me back. When I flew to that area I just felt a feeling of proximity, like I was “close.” In reality, I was further than I realized, but the hunch on the general area was right.

One day in 2008, while at my computer, I had a sort of epiphany. I knew where it was…or where it ought to be. I knew that if I went to this place, I would be looking for a Great Stone and while there was no way to verify that there was one in this place at the time, I knew I had to go. I arranged with my flight department to get a week off at the end of September and called the only person on earth who might be game for this kind of thing: my younger brother Nick. Nick is a lifelong athlete. His diet is healthy, his workout regime is disciplined and he was successfully juggling a relationship, running a new company and going to school for a Masters Degree in Business. I remember calling him from a Walmart parking lot in Chesterfield, MO and asking him if he’s like to go on a hike. Sure, he said. He asked when. I said two weeks. He asked where and I told him. He asked why and I said I would explain when we got there. I told him to bring everything he could stuff into a backpack and I’d buy his airline tickets and take care of the rest. Suddenly life started to feel like those magical adventure stories I loved as a child. Could it be that I were being drawn in to this amazing story as I always dreamed I would be?

We arrived at the destination airport and it was a bizarre moment. I hadn’t seen him in almost a year. I was in Missouri, he was in South Carolina, and we only saw each other at Christmas at our parents’ house in Tampa. My brother felt like a stranger now with our grown-up jobs and lives. Nevermind. We got the rental car, stopped for supplies and I explained the purpose of the trip. I think he was a bit taken aback realizing that he didn’t know about this huge part of his own sister’s life for so many years. I think he was also glad to be the one to be asked to go with me. The plan was to start early, in the dark. We’d get a good night’s sleep nearby and start the journey before the sun was up so we could get there and back in a long day. That said, looking back on it, we had no idea what we were doing, and were grossly unprepared.

We brought a lot of stuff we thought we’d need, and a shovel of course. We were not counting on the weather, being cold and rainy as it was in the end of September. We never saw the sun once, in fact. I had my maps of the area and double checked that we were going the right way. After several hours we realized that our pace was a lot slower than we’d anticipated, and it was likely we would have to spend the night on the way back. At noon, we were around half way there. We figured we’d be there at noon. It was becoming clear we had underestimated this journey, despite all of the research and planning. We went on and on until we started what I believed to be the final stretch to the spot. It suddenly seemed to get very dark, even though it was only 2PM. As we went onward in silence, suddenly my brother turned around. His face was ashen and he looked panicked. He said he could not take another step. We were carrying all of our water with us, and rationing it as we went. Food was limited because we thought we would be back at the car by nightfall. He looked sick. I didn’t understand what was wrong, and I told him to go back down the trail to the last place we rested and I would meet him there. 

I continued on alone, driven, and feeling like our mission was under some kind of attack. My brother was in better physical shape than just about anyone I knew, especially me. I kept going and it got only got darker. A thick fog swallowed everything, and it was ominously quiet. I had given my brother my last water bottle and I had nothing to drink. I kept going, and actually at one point tried drinking the water droplets off the branches of trees that were low enough. But the path ahead was endless. Every time I thought I was almost there, I wasn’t. I started thinking about my brother and whether he was really sick, and what would we do if he was? We hadn’t seen another person all day, and it was getting noticeably colder. I looked up at the fog-enshrouded path ahead and felt torn. I was so close. But even the trees seems to discourage me from continuing. They tried to slap sense into me as I pressed onward. This was it. It had to be. But around the next corner it was nothing but endlessness. I checked my watch. It was 4PM. It would be getting dark soon, and then there would be even bigger problems. I gave one last look at the trail ahead, and turned away, and didn’t look back.  I descended quickly and was amazed at how far I’d apparently gone because it felt like I’d only left my brother a short time ago. I would realize later that I was within 400′ of my destination, when I decided to abandon the mission and turn around.

I found Nick resting, but ok.  He still looked panicked. This was not going according to plan. We knew we could not possibly make it to the car by nightfall. We would have to spend the night somewhere. We decided to hike back and get as much distance as we could under our belts so the morning’s hike would be shorter. He hiked quickly, with purpose, like he could’t wait to get out of there. I tried to keep up. I started to feel a pain in my left knee as I walked. It started to rain….hard. The trail turned to slick mud and we struggled to continue. At some point my leg ran right into the stump of a branch from a fallen tree along the way. Despite my layers of clothing, it hit hard and the pain was dizzying. It eclipsed the other pain coming from my knee area. We got to an area that we could spend the night, and pitch the tent as the rain continued. We didn’t sleep well of course. We awoke to frost and bone numbing cold. My left leg felt like lead, and it was heavy,  stiff and painful, and the bruise from the tree was black and blue, covering most of my thigh. We packed up and started out. I realized quickly I was hurt. Walking was not easing the stiffness. Something was wrong in my leg. I struggled for a mile or so, but it became apparent to my brother who was way ahead, that I was just prolonging this miserable experience with my pace. When he came back to check on me, I told him straight up that I was hurt, and didn’t know why, and I just couldn’t carry the backpack anymore. So he carried both of them, for 6 miles, while I inched along, the pain growing with every step.

We made it to the car and arrived at the hotel with a night to rest before the flight home. My leg was bruised from hip to knee and other than the large bullseye bruise from the tree stump, I didn’t understand how I’d hurt myself. I returned home and was sick for about a week with a horrible flu, no doubt from getting run down on that hike. After a week off, my leg was still a mess. I went to the doctor and had it looked at. They’re first question was what the heck was I doing when this happened, since that type of injury is usually seen in football players.  I said hiking with a heavy backpack. I’d torn my iliotobial band tendon and started to rupture my quadricep muscle where it attaches to the knee. It took a year of rehab therapy and chiropractic care to heal it as best it could. I was determined to try again. My brother said “No way.” So I joined a gym and went as often as I could to teach my knee to support my weight again in activities other than normal walking.

In early 2009, my dream job ended with the collapse of the economy. I had bought the house in mid 2008, and now in late January of 2009 I was told I was being laid off. I would have three months’ severance and benefits, and then I would be on my own. I put the house and my second car up for sale. In this time I happened to meet my boyfriend, named Noah, who I’d met right before my layoff. On one of his visits to St. Louis, he ended up snowed in with me for five days. I fell in love, and of course shared with him the story of what happened, and why I was wearing a knee brace. He said right away that he would like to go back with me, if I ever decided to. It depended on a lot of things. Money was very tight now with no income, and even the chiropractor and gym seemed like frivolous luxuries. He was between jobs too, as an engineer, and we decided to pool our efforts in this storm. Through the summer I flew contract trips for pay-by-the-day while he fixed motorcycles, ATVs and dirt bikes in my garage for money, all while the house was for sale. Toward the end of the summer, I felt my knee was good enough to try again, and we made plans for the second expedition. This time, we planned to spend 2 nights to give my knee a break instead of pushing it. I knew though, that I might get 5 miles in and have to turn around, because the training I did at the gym wasn’t really comparable to an actual hike. 

We flew, then drove, then arrived at the same spot I was with my brother a year ago. After a long morning, we got around halfway there, I took a break and I soaked my knee in a cold stream. So far it only gave me a twinge of discomfort now and again. We rested for the night. In the morning we got up with a sense of purpose. The sun was breaking through the clouds. I felt ok. I remembered the phrase in the Prophecy “But through that gloom shall gleam the Sun, when I was lost, and again am won.” We pushed onward, and Noah helped me in areas that would be stressful for my knee. We passed the point where my brother turned back. We passed the point where I turned back. Finally….we were there, just as I’d imagined in every sacred dream. There was the Great Stone, exactly as I’d imagined, but then the bottom fell out of my stomach—there in the spot where it should be, was a gaping hole in the earth. Someone had recently been here. Noah saw the look on my face and tried to comfort me. I dug anyway but the ground was like quicksand. This can’t be….

Needless to say, I have since discovered the creator of that hole, and am proud to call him a friend. His story is as incredible as mine in fact, and our stories parallel each other in struggle, determination and unwillingness to admit defeat. In fact he told me after hearing my tale that he was so sorry that I found the hole that he dug. I said it was okay! His story quelled my feelings of defeat because of the brave circumstances of his own battle to find the Horn. Noah and I decided the Horn must have been discovered long ago and never disclosed to Mr. Green. When we got back to the hotel, I emailed Mr. Green and told him the story of my second attempt. He and I had corresponded after the first failed attempt in 2008. He relayed to me the story of another adventurer who had been to the spot only a month before Noah and I. This brave young man brought a metal detector and found it was the wrong kind because it couldn’t filter out the metal in the native rocks. This young man also underestimated the journey and spent a terrifying night there.

Over dinner that night, I said to Noah, that we had to go back again….in a month, otherwise we’d have to wait until next year, and with the economy and our job situations, there was no telling what next year would be. We needed a metal detector designed to find treasure. One that would filter out the metal in the rocks and be able to see if that box with the Horn had perhaps moved over the years. Soil is an amazing substance. I studied it in geology and it rarely stays in place over decades. So, with no job, a mortgage to pay and unemployment checks barely making a dent in the living costs, I bought a ridiculously expensive metal detector after researching on all of the treasure forums for the very best one for the job.

I practiced with it until I could locate the copper pipes under my house, as well as buried metal objects underground at Noah’s father’s farm. It was designed for treasure caches, not finding coins and buttons.  This instrument was made for finding metallic things buried more than 12 inches below the surface and deeper. The next challenge would be to get it there on the airlines, and haul it all the way to the spot, keeping it dry in case it rained. We’d barely recovered physically from the last attempt when we were on our way back again. I was getting really good at knowing what to bring and what to get once in the area. Even though we were armed with the instrument of verification, I felt even before we began that we weren’t going to find it. I didn’t understand why I felt this way though. Noah was a great sport. He’d only met me a few months earlier and was game to follow me on this crazy quest like Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. For that, I am forever grateful to him.

The third journey went like the others. It was long, and strenuous. I had some leftover 800mg Motrin pills the doctor gave me just in case my knee gave me problems. I ended up taking two the first day. We camped and there was a horrendous thunderstorm that roared down on us like a monster, angry that we were back yet again. There is nothing quite as exquisite as being caught in a place far from shelter, in a tent while the wrath of God rains down lightning all around you. The campsite flooded and it was an effort to keep the metal detector dry at all costs. The morning after the storm felt like being washed up on a beach after a shipwreck. Our tent was in the middle of a veritable lake, it seemed, and was on the highest spit of dirt anywhere. The metal detector was dry. It was another sunny day, like before.

We passed familiar landmarks and powered on through the growing ache in my knee. Like before, we arrived at the site, and the hole. Someone had thrown some logs and stones in the hole by the Great Stone. I started sweeping the area, adjusting the calibration as I went. Strangely, I heard nothing. The ground was very wet. At one point I sunk in all the way up to my thigh. All the more reason to check all around to see if the Horn had moved in the pliable soil. But everywhere I swept, there was just the background noise of the metallic rocks. A copper box and a metal base such as the Horn had, would make this metal detector light up, even if I wasn’t directly pointing at it. I went all around and under the Stone. I went behind it, in front of it and all I pulled up was a juice can buried several inches in the mud that a thoughtless hiker had left behind.

“It’s not here.” I said to Noah who was resting on a log. In that moment I remembered the account in the Bible of the angel by the empty tomb, telling those who came to the tomb of Jesus that “he’s not here,” because he’d already arisen. It was so very hard to turn away that third time. What if it’s there and I’m just operating this thing incorrectly? What if I neglected to sweep one place? These questions haunted me on the way down. That hike down was awful. When we were halfway to where we’d left our tent, not far from where my brother had broken down on the trail, Noah said, “Look! There it is! It’s the Horn!” Bewildered, I looked up to see him pointing at the most peculiar looking tree. It was clearly dead, stripped of every branch and leaf and only a white, fifty-foot tall,  sun-bleached trunk remained. The bark was gnarled with twisting striations that made it look very much like Michael Green’s depiction of the Spiral Horn.

There was no denying that something greater than both of us was at work here. It called me to the bookstore. It recharged me when I threw my notes in the fire. It chased me away when my brother got sick and my concern for him overpowered my will to find the Horn. It pushed me to rehabilitate my knee and do the hike that injured it twice in a month. Now it seemed at the end of all things, it seemed to be saluting me on the way out. Even so, I began the analysis of what we did wrong, and whether to try again. I didn’t speak much on the long journey out. I thought about many things. One of which was why I was really doing this. If I actually found the Horn, just like in my dreams, what in the world would I do with it? Would I check it on the airplane, or Fed Ex? How ridiculous is that thought really? Would I bring it home and hang it next to my sword? Who would ask about it, and who would have the desire to even hear the story? Did it really belong with me, or anyone?

That led me to think about the idea of the “rightful owner” of the Horn. Who really IS the rightful owner of a Unicorn’s Horn, except the Unicorn himself? Of course the Manuscript stated that the Horn chooses an “owner” and so whomever found the Horn would be “chosen” by it. How sad though, that only one person can be chosen by a single talisman. My wish, on the hike out, was that truly everyone who seeks, could find it. That was when I realized that I was coming away from the whole 23 year ordeal with much, much more than a treasure in a box. Would you rather find a treasure before anyone else can, or be a part of an incredible story, with others who have also had incredible stories on the same journey. What if my story inspires others to keep searching just to get to that spot, knowing that there may not be a Horn to find. Then again, maybe there is.

 

• 4Q) The fate of the magnificent Silver Bound Spiral Horn has become a mystery.  Do you have any regrets on searching for it?  Do you still ponder its whereabouts?

I have no regrets. All of the years of study and research have molded me into a person I would not otherwise be. The mental journey was hard, and at times I was depressed, doubtful and ready to give up, but the hope of finding a symbol of Truth and Light in this ever-darkening world always pushed me onward. The physical journey taught me that I am stronger than I know. Even now, I still have occasional pain in my knee from the injury, which was determined to be caused by carrying too much weight, over too far a distance, and for too much time. As for the whereabouts of the Horn….A part of me still searches for it, and won’t ever rest. It’s been searching since that day in the bookstore and it doesn’t want let go of the adventure.

But as I said before, even if I had found it, what would I do with it? Since it remains a mystery, so many others can partake of their own quest. One thought that I had, which I shared with Michael Green in one of my emails, was that perhaps by the power of collective belief, the Horn did, in fact, return to its rightful owner. From the outset, there were many people, myself included, who believed this was indeed a 15th Century lost manuscript, and not a work of fiction. With “nothing being new under the sun” as the saying goes, we really can’t write true “fiction” per se, so all ideas have to begin with a seed of truth. What if, through the power of so many believing in the Horn, and the Unicorn, that it didn’t just slip across a boundary into another realm, very close to this one, with a door being right at the Great Stone. Perhaps the Unicorn himself came to collect his Horn, since the power of belief allowed him to once again be among us for a short time,  in a world that hardly remembers him.

 

• 5Q) What was your favorite part or parts of the quest?  Are you planning on revisiting the Great Stone?

With so many seemingly serious parts of this quest for me, there were a few moments that I hold onto as being worth it all. My correspondence with Michael Green was extremely healing for me. I sent him my epic tale in three installments, and his answers always gave me a sense of peace. At times he forwarded other emails he received from other seekers and asked if I would share with them my story. I felt honored to do so. Many of them hadn’t figured out where the Horn was, but I wanted to encourage them to keep trying, because you have to go there and see for yourself. Maybe it’s there and maybe it isn’t….but regardless there IS a treasure for everyone to find with this quest, whether you return with the actual Horn or not. My correspondence with Dan, who dug the hole that broke my heart has been wonderful. We’ve decided that at some point, we need to go there again together, not for the purpose of recovering a treasure, but for paying homage to the quest that will always be with us in our hearts.  It would be even better if Jenny Kile could join us as well!

 

• 6Q) What does the hunt mean to you, and has it had any impact on your life?

The Quest for the Horn has been the only real “hunt” I’ve done. I thought about others, such as Michael Green’s other work, In Search of the Dragontooth, and it just didn’t resonate with me like Unicornis. The art and premise of that story was just as fantastic, but Unicornis spoke to something very deep inside that wanted more than just a treasure hunt, I wanted the search for a symbol of Truth. Since my three hikes to the spot, I’ve come to realize a lot, and continue to unravel the mystery in my own mind. I’ve met online others who have been there, and some have contacted me looking for encouragement. I feel honored to be able to do that.

Everyone who seeks it, should get the chance to walk that path. Perhaps it is still there, and has “hidden itself” after it’s initial hiding, so that now truly, it will be found by the one that should find it. Maybe it will never be found, and if so, even better, because then more people will go there hoping to be the one to find it, and in the process, they will find something even greater. What IS greater? To find and own a thing, or to be a part of an amazing story and fantastic adventure, and help others to do the same? I know one day I will return again, to make peace with it all. Until then, I’m still processing the whole ordeal.

I spoke to Dan not long ago, and he felt the same way. It’s been 5 or 6 years since we made our respective journeys and we’re both still processing what it all means. I hope through this writing that I encourage everyone who is working on the solution to continue working, and those who are planning to go to the site, please go. I don’t want to believe that it can’t still be found, but if its disappearance makes 1000 people go, who would not have gone otherwise, then how greater the impact! The story will be with me always, as will the small part I played in it. I guess all I really wished for, as a ten-year-old, was to be a part of an amazing story like the ones I read about. Whether you find the Horn, or not, by solving the Riddle and journeying to the spot, you will become part of the amazing story that is Unicornis!

 

 

Thanks so much for sharing your amazing journey with us!  I feel it’s a remarkable testament of someone who has discovered the value, mystery, and secrets of not only the quest, but of the Horn of The Unicornis Manuscripts!

When in 2013 we solved the Riddle, and visited the Great Stone, we immediately noticed a mound of dirt beside an indentation, beneath the Spiral marked Stone.  We knew someone had been there before us.  I am so grateful to learn about some of those worthy adventurers who had traveled there previously.  As the story of the Horn does not end here, I am sure there will be others who journey after. And who knows, the Horn may eventually find its owner.  Michael Green has created a beautiful and long lasting adventure for all who seek it.

I would love to visit the Great Stone again, and be with such great company.  It is a search that has a place in my heart, as it does yours, and will others.