The only thing disambiguating was the "answer bank" used for the metapuzzle. It had a ton of random phrases listed next to numbers, and there was no number 9 on it. (There were a lot of other numbers skipped, too - after all, it did go up to 4213.)
So, it was a useless race that made my hands hurt like hell, leading to an ambiguous final clue.
And finally, the metapuzzle. Back in that area where we found the sudoku pictures, there was a letter Q taped to a tree. The meta clue was to go to that area and look for a letter. (I had already found it.) Going to Q4 (since it was in a square with …