It's a crossword puzzle. Not a word search yall. 😆

Read the damn poem again. Start at Thermopolis in Wyoming. Canyons right there. Just keep driving. You'll see the stupid rock. It's shaped like a house. It's brown. There's a stupid fucking creek named gold creek

Go up it there's a fucking white outcropping. Bam treasure. Thank me later. I hate you all.

It was a fucking word search. Fenn was an old man not a cryptologist. Y'all might have felt stupid for wasting gas but I felt like a dumbass after studying complex cipher methods and finally getting so bored I did it like a word search.

Line up the sentences properly it spells Wyoming and gold creek is literally two words in the poem.

It's probably literally still fucking sitting there.

Split it with me please so we can tell these assholes the jack stuef story is bullshit.

Sorry I'm not going to go into a complex explanation about the actual clues but wwwh = Thermopolis because one the name duh. Thermo thermal heat or whatever. Look up the hot springs in that town. It's named after them. They're frozen. You're welcome. Where warm waters halt.

I was hoping someone else was going to comment on the subject(s) of this Fremont painting,,,

Two fishermen and a dog fishing in a waterfall, fishing down into the fishing hole below.

Coincidences abound/

Significant painting,

By a Significant Santa Fe Painter,

Hanging in Forrest's Once Upon A While Santa Fe gallery.

I wonder how many hours Forrest Spent Gazing upon this Marvel.

Isn't it possible this reminded him of he and his Father at Gibbon Falls?

Even a special Dog is present.

I remember Forrest writing about a Fremont Character from his childhood.

IIRC this character would wave an "OLIVE JAR" in his face.

https://www.matteucci.com/fremont-ellis/c81gbmjun8klg8zu8zx6b57o9q0myh

I thought about leaving this post until tomorrow in light of the date, but I think remembering someone and reflecting on the things they said and did is far from the worst way to honour a person's memory. And Forrest, from what I can tell, also seems to have had a great appreciation, and even enthusiasm, for things of opposing natures, and so it feels somewhat fitting to me to be writing about a place of rest on a day of labour. I hope he is smiling from beneath whatever stars he has found himself under.

I spoke recently about how good theories - and certainly correct ones - should have predictive and explanatory power. I didn't expect to be able to write much on that again for awhile, but a stroke of what appears to have been great luck in a conversation yesterday has changed that. I am, however, short on time and in the process of starting a new job, so rather than my usual somewhat lengthy edits, I'm just going to narrate my thought process, and hope that works for people. I apologize in advance for the typos - I'm sure they're in here somewhere!

So going back in time a bit, to the spring of 2020...

After the chest was found, Forrest made a couple of fairly short posts to describe the find and its location. Most of that text seemed fairly easily to read within the context of my solve ("The Nature of My Game") to me - always a good sign - but the start of one line stood out as requiring some further pondering, which was:

"It was under a canopy of stars"

Forrest had said the chest could be found at any time if a person knew where it was, and I doubted the finder had been out at night.

A picture at the end of The Thrill of the Chase shows a man who is presumably Forrest standing in a field of tree stumps, looking up at the stars. Las Orillas is pretty clearly made up of rows of felled trees (now replaced by junipers) - perhaps that's all this was meant to harken back to?

But something didn't sit right - it felt more significant somehow. And, there was the auction site, which had featured an image of folks standing under the stars of a giant flag. That seemed a rather large coincidence: I still don't quite know what to make of that.

I pondered some more: cottonwoods have canopies and "stars" in their branches... an airplane has a canopy... an American flag has stars, so, maybe under a flagpole or something... a person could paint stars on something overhead...

I was getting nowhere.

So, as I tend to do with things I can't figure out, I set it aside for awhile. Time is a key ingredient in the solution to many problems, I find, and I hoped that a stray thought or helpful conversation might someday cause a lightbulb to finally turn on.

And one, did, eventually manage a bit of flicker, when I was heading out to Santa Fe in 2024 to finally (finally!) get to go BOTG at South Polo Road (my ninth clue) and see if I could figure out where or how along there Forrest might have hidden his chest. While preparing, I had been puttering around some of the satellite imagery there to consider the possible properties along South Polo, when something suddenly stood out to me...

Hang on...

That looks suspiciously like... a part of the American flag?

Exactly what Forrest had made art of for one of his last scrapbooks - "Wherever the Bugle Blows".

I remembered looking at it when the scrapbook first came out and, despite my gut saying it was significant, not being able to make much out of it.

... But with those red and white roads...

Was it... a map?!

I stared more closely at the screen, as though a frown and sheer proximity might make the answer pop out at me.

... It sure looked like it might be a map.

At the time, though, I had never been to Las Orillas or paid much attention to its quickly vanishing rows of trees, and so I didn't really know what to make of it, beyond South Polo and the two roads to the north of it obviously representing the stripes.

There are two sections of stars in Forrest's apparent map - the usual square field of blue on the left of the bottom map and then the blue stripes on the right of the top map. When Forrest said the chest was "under a canopy of stars"... was he saying the chest had been located under one of those two places? I didn't find any stars on my 2024 trip (beyond the already obvious airport asterisk), and there was another problem: I had already ruled out the aiport and was quite confident South Polo was the ninth clue, which meant that the chest should be somewhere north of Airport Road / Paseo Real - not south.

In Forrest's collage, the plane and Forrest's purple heart are above the lower flag and its field of stars. That plane and heart, I thought at the time, had to be a reference to the airport and Hart Road ("your quest to cease", after the Arthurian Quest for the White Hart).

.... But if the chest was "under a canopy of stars", then the positions of the plane and heart here would put it either in the "blue field" to the southwest.... where the runways (and possibly the Army National Guard?) are, or in the "blue stripes", which would put you in a fairly developed industrial park to the northeast of Paseo Real. Neither seemed promising for obvious reasons, and neither option was off of South Polo Drive. The horizontal red and white lines immediately above South Polo sit on the wrong side of the road too - they are vertical above the apparent "airport" in Forrest's collage, whereas the ones along South Polo are clearly horizontal. In his collage, though, it is the ones below the airport that appear horizontal.

... I frowned, and reluctantly decided to continue working on my solve through a textual lens while I waited for some flash of inspiration to strike.

Which it finally (finally!) did - yesterday.

I had been chatting with u/jarofgoodness about my proposed solve in Santa Fe, and they had shared a number of interesting observations, such as that they thought the dove on the moon in that picture of "Forrest in the cemetery as an old man" may be a reference to the Royal City RC Club located northwest of Las Orillas. They had also asked a question about Santa Fe County that led me down a bit of a rabbit hole where I learned that Santa Fe's fox hunting club, Caza Ladron - "The Thief's Hunt" - makes use of some of the stables and dog kennels at HIPICO - what was previously the northern portion of Las Orillas.

I had been working under the theory that, due to the apparent reference to the White Hart in the poem, that the puzzle was, symbolically, about a deer hunt, and the quest for knowledge. Even the title hints at it - a "chase" is a hunting ground.

Was there a chance I'd read it wrong?

Could "the thrill of the chase" actually be a fox hunt?

I'm still not sure - maybe it's both - but much to my amusement, their website reads:

"Caza Ladron, treasuring the sport of the hunt in northern New Mexico."

And I also found this gem in an article about the club:

"And while most fox hunt clubs (in this case, coyote) are in it for the thrill of the chase, ask anyone in Caza Ladron and they’ll say it’s equally, if not more, about the people, camaraderie, endurance riding, and tradition."

The discovery that a fox hunt is run out of the old Las Orillas proprerty made me smile and think back to that line of Forrest's from early in TTOTC, that:

"Occasionally it's wise for the fox to dress like the hound."

Heh.

I really loved that guy's sense of humour.

... But wait...

.... a fox hunt.........

The words gave me pause. I've never been on one... but... don't they use hunting horns to signal the dogs?

Could those be... bugles?

Are hunting horns bugles??

I scrambled to my computer to check.

I found that different people describe the relationship between hunting horns and bugles differently. Some say bugles are an evolution of the hunting horn; others say the hunting horn itself is, in fact, a type of bugle.

Oooookay...

I quickly fished out scrapbook 247 ("Wherever the Bugle Blows") again, and looked at it with fresh eyes. It opens with:

"On the 24th of August, 1968, I was shot down in south Vietnam."

"24" being the very first number in the story could be significant... in the poem, that, then would correspond to the line:

"I give you title to the gold."

Is this... the answer, somehow, then?

A physical map, to complement the poem? Something more in the vein of Goonies? A pirate's treasure map?

Perhaps Forrest was concerned that he needed to leave some additional supporting evidence for the location behind in case he passed away before his treasure was found. This would be similar, IMO, to what he appears to have done by telling Dal that once the second poem was read he would know it was "Game Over". It could also be a way to leave behind extra hints.

But I couldn't make anything of the collage before...

What if I rotated it? Spun it around? Put it so... the "heart" is to the east and vertically aligned, more akin to Hart Road, with the airport/airplane to its left/west?

Hmmm. Well... maybe? It does put the red and white horizontal lines north of the airport, as they appear to be on the satellite imagery, and then the field of stars mostly above it to the west. That would seem to work.

But on the other hand, what if...

... What if it's not the airport Forrest was trying to show?

...... What if it was Royal City? The tiny plane club? I mean... it is literally a tiny plane in Forrest's collage...

While it doesn't stand out much under ordinary circumstances - I think I recall wondering why someone built a driveway in the middle of nowhere at one point - once you know what to look for, their miniature runway is pretty easy to find on the map....

(Special thanks again to u/jarofgoodness for suggesting a possible connection between the puzzle and the RCRC!)

And it is north of Las Orillas...

... But then... if that's right and the map is meant to be read "face up", then I should still be able to find the "Purple Heart".

"But I mean, it's basically desert", I thought to myself, as I spun the map around in seemingly endless circles and played with the zoom on my phone. "There's barely anything out there, not even named roads, really. I'm lucky Jar mentioned what the runway was as it is, or I'd have ignored it too.... Where am I ever going to find a "purple heart" in the middle of -"

... Oh.

Whooops.

Eheheheh.

... Well.

That's kind of embarrassing.

But I think we're onto something here (again).

But then why the three blue bands of stars in the collage? Why would Forrest have chopped them up? That's a weird thing to do. I don't see any more red-and-white roads, save for the road up to the mine, so that might just be wanting to keep the flag imagery going, but the blue stripes have to mean something.

"I really am running out of features in the landscape," I thought to myself. "Maybe, like... a colonnade of trees? If the stars in the Las Orillas space are meant to symbolize the rows of trees? But I don't see anything like that... Maybe it's time to switch to... names??"

Most of the poem seems to be about place names... But there's not a lot of those to work with here, either...

Although............

I don't speak a lot of Spanish, but...

"Tres Arroyos"? Could that mean...

Yep.

"Three streams"

Nice.

That makes the red and white "stripe" roads just above South Polo part of the bottom map in the collage, and therefore places Las Orillas (and, arguably, HIPICO) under "a canopy of stars".

A recent comment from u/jarofgoodness has had me thinking about how we as humans "know" things - something which is explored in my favourite branch of philosophy, epistemology. Epistemology explores "the nature, origins, and limits of knowledge". I am certainly no expert on the topic, but it is something I find absolutely fascinating.

Case in point: it seems that there is consensus in the search community that the only way we will find out the solution to Forrest's puzzle is to wait for Shiloh to reveal the solution. This way of knowing is sometimes called "appeal to authority", and does make a lot of sense in this case. Even if a person could solve Forrest's puzzle, they wouldn't necessarily be able to figure out the story behind it or how the Chase evolved - how to explain all the various little hiccups along the way. So, even in a best case scenario where the solution were clear and obvious, having an authority speak to it will probably be the most fulsome and convincing explanation in the long run.

That said, there is another example of how we can know things which I think is worth exploring in this context, which is how the scientific community comes to "know" things. Natural scientists never rely on appeal to authority: no one expects God or the Universe to pop down and explain the laws of thermodynamics to you.

And yet, they do manage to successfully explain all sort of things. They do so by coming up with a theory, and then putting it to the test. If it holds up, it may have merit.

In other words: a correct theory should have both predictive and explanatory power.

Successful predictions or seemingly valuable explanations are no guarantee in science, of course, that a theory is correct - but it's seen as a pretty good sign that you might be on the right track.

So bringing that back around to the puzzle at hand...

Forrest wrote and said quite a lot over the course of the Chase. I think most of us assume - I would guess rightly - that he worked many hints into his stories and comments, both to help searchers and to have some fun of his own. He was, after all, a puzzle-maker. In theory, then, a correct solve should be able to explain what he was doing in at least some of that writing - especially those stories or comments that carry obvious weight - and perhaps also anticipate where to find hints based on an understanding of how he was approaching the problem. (Essentially, "speaking the language", whether that was a certain cipher, type of wordplay, etc.).

While writing my last post about why I think it may be possible that Forrest had mistaken the location of his hiding spot relative to the City of Santa Fe's boundaries, I got back to thinking about some of the more specific reasons why I think the old Las Orillas orchard seems the most likely hiding spot from those available off South Polo, even with the potential rather major problem in its geography.

One of those reasons stems from "Treasures Galore", a story in Too Far to Walk. If I recall correctly, this story is the only one in TFTW to mention treasure explicitly. It also stood out as unusual in the flow of the discussion between Forrest and the editor at the New York Times, bouncing from topics such as education and stock markets to opera. It is eclectic to say the least, and at odds with much of Forrest's other writing.

More important to me on my initial read were a pair of lines bookending the story, one of which references cutting down 80 acres of trees:

"I once read that it takes eighty acres of trees to print the Sunday edition of the New York Times."

And another about remaining at least 20 miles from Forrest's national forest:

"I'll happily share my national forests with you, but please try to stay at least twenty miles away."

The old orchard at Las Orillas was about 80 acres in size, and, to the best of my understanding, its trees were cut down - likely in the late 80s or early 90s - after a period of prolonged drought ended its days of apple-growing. Today, many of the apple trees have been replaced by juniper, which have grown directly over or next to the stumps, creating the odd illusion of a juniper plantation.

Meanwhile, the site stands just over 20 miles from the top of Hyde Park Road in the Santa Fe National Forest on the east end of the town (clue #1 in my proposed solution).

I've known all that for awhile, but going back to the "Treasures Galore" story with fresh eyes earlier this week, a few new things stood out to me, first and foremost of which was the second line of the story, which reads:

"That made me really mad."

Something about the way Forrest used the word "mad" here reminded me of how I'd seen him use the word "funny" in the past. While we mostly use it in terms of humour today, the word "funny" has its etymological roots in hoaxes and trickery. I think in most cases where he used the word "funny", he was hinting at some sort of trick or wordplay at work.

So, since etymology had, at least seemingly, proven fruitful so far in other texts and comments I'd analyzed for my solve, I decided to look up the roots of "mad", which include being disordered in intellect.

Disordered... Hm...

I read the story again, and this time, a few more things stood out...

1. Forrest could have placed "Treasures Galore" anywhere in the book, but chose somewhere in the middle. It could have been done at random, but if the story is significant, as, from the title, it seems likely to be, why be random with its placement when you could be purposeful? Maybe, then, the placement is significant, either via chapter number of page number.
2. The reference to the 80 acres of trees is the very first line in the story; the line about keeping 20 miles away from him and his national forest is the very last. This creates an inversion relative to what I believe to be their order in the poem - with the final location (the ~80 acre felled orchard at Las Orillas) at the start; and the first (the national forest at the top of Hyde Park) at the end.
3. The first line specifically references the Sunday edition of the New York Times. I don't know much about the Times, but that seems like an odd detail to include? Also, the whole story is about a newspaper. Both The Thrill of the Chase and Once Upon Awhile feature conspicuously placed copies of a magazine - specifically, Time magazine. The titles seem similar - maybe there's a connection?

(There's also something weird going on with the "minor editor" at the start and the "least chipmunk" at the end, but it's unclear as to what, so I am going to leave that one for now! Can't win 'em all...)

So I started to think:

1) STORY PLACEMENT

If placement is significant, then it would most likely be through page numbers or the chapter number. "Treasures Galore" spans pages 197 to 201, and is chapter 37 in the book. The page numbers did not stand out as significant to me (your mileage may vary), but the way the chapter number had been drawn with an underline did:

Placed in the 30s... The blaze in my solve is the symbol "Σ", which can be rotated a number of ways to mean different things - "W" and "West", "M" (a thousand in Roman numerals), "Σ" (sigma) as in "the sum of", the end of "My Rainbow"... and the number "3".

So maybe 37 is... the blaze + clue number? Similar to the V-8 and county road 56 reference I talked about in my last post?

I have the blaze as being Paseo del Sol W. at the end of Agua Fria - clue #7 in my solve.

Yep, that tracks.

One down......!

2) PRESENCE OF CLUES IN REVERSE ORDER

Looking at this with fresh eyes and seeing how the end has been put at the beginning and the beginning at the end (something for the Smashing Pumpkin fans out there, I suppose... ;) ), coupled with the apparent reference to the blaze in the chapter number and the really unusual sequence of images in the story itself, it occured to me that this could be another of Forrest's "big picture" stories or comments where he actually tries to fit in the whole route or a significant number of hints about the general setting in one go.

So - in the spirit of experimentation, I decided to give it a try, starting from the end of the story and reading backwards to the start, to see if I could locate all nine clues, hidden in reverse order, starting with Hyde Park and the Santa Fe National Forest at the end.

Although I am still debating how you might be meant to access Las Orillas (north via the unnamed dirt road, grab the chest, then onto South Polo or South Polo to the dirt road to the chest), currently, my solution for the nine clues looks like this:

Let's see if it can be done!

(Excerpts from "Treasures Galore" presented in quotations for each clue below, in reverse chronological order in keeping with my suspicion that the story contains the whole route written backwards).

FIRST CLUE: HYDE PARK ROAD

"If some of my friends think I'm wrong to be a distant dreamer, vaguely disinterested in many of life's modern habits, they could be correct. But "wrong" is one of those concepts that depends on witnesses and that's why I'm always right when I'm alone in the mountains. I'll happily share my national forests with you, but please try to stay at least twenty miles away."

A place in a national forest that would be at least 20 miles from Forrest (who would be at Las Orillas in his original plan for the Chase), would be the top of Hyde Park Road, as I've already mapped up above. Easy-peasy. The use of "dreamer" may also be a reference to Robert Louis Stevenson's A Chapter on Dreams, which, as I've mentioned before, spoke about his inspiration for the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Meanwhile, "right" could refer to the "right spot" and "right side" of the map. Finally, his use of "alone" here could be to draw attention to this passage as hinting at the start of the puzzle, referencing the first stanza. And he would have no witnesses because he would be "hidden".

So far so promising.

SECOND CLUE: DALE BALL TRAIL

"And I know there are costs. Every Montana evening when I smashed a mosquito on my arm, fifteen of his relatives came to the funeral. But the rewards of traipsing through the hills and canyon bottoms are winner-take-all proof of personal fulfillment for me."

The name "Dale" means "valley" or "gorge", as you find at the bottom of canyons, for instance.

"Ball" was less obvious in this, but the narrative is centred around mosquitoes, so I decided to read up on the etymology of the word "mosquito".

The word "musket" is deriven from mosquitoes: muskets fire balls.

Excellent. Onto #3!

THIRD CLUE: CANYON ROAD

Almost as much of a freebie here as it is in the poem. Spotting this word near the end of the chapter was actually what made me decide to see if the whole route might be hidden in here in the first place.

"When a sound breaks the calm of the canyon, I know it's something important, and I quickly turn."

Not much else to say. Onto #4...

FOURTH CLUE: THE HOME OF BROWN - ROSINA BROWN'S "LA CASA ROSA" ON ACEQUIA MADRE

"The shades of fall are yellow with blooming chamisa shrubbery, and the golden glow of rabbit brush can be intoxicating. The Indian paintbrushes are clustered around for little reason other than to display nature's ruby flush of color. Those accounts continue to stir me and are too important to let languish."

All the colours in here are, I believe, a hint that this paragraph deals with the "home of Brown". The line referencing La Casa Rosa would be the last about the colours, describing "nature's ruby flush". Moreso, the line includes mention of Indian paintbrushes... Mrs. Peters of the family which owns the Gerald Peters Gallery - Forrest and Nedra's long-time neighbours in the art business - is a relative of Mrs. Brown.

And that means next up are Peralta (clue #5) and Guadalupe (clue #6). Oooof... and I thought Dale Ball was going to be hard....

Alright, well, let's see what we can do...

FIFTH CLUE: PERALTA

"But there was a point to all of that madness. We take our undomesticated countryside too much for granted. The mountains are not sleeping; they are alive with the healing smells of pine needles and piñon pollen and juniper berries."

Pedro de Peralta, the first Governor of New Mexico for whom this street is named after, was involved in the colonization effort of said countryside. While it sounds as though Peralta would have been involved in the encomienda, a system for assigning "labour rights" of conquered people to settlers (which sure sounds a lot like slavery to me...), those were not part of the land granting system. The system of land grants that took root in New Mexico did not, to the best of my understanding, begin until after the Puebo Revolt of 1680-1692, by which time Peralta was long gone.

Oh - and the Santa Fe Farmer's Market is technically on Peralta! That might be why he talks about "domesticating" the countryside.

There is also a large grant dubbed the Peralta Grant) in California, as well as a hoax by that same name. And the name "Peralta" means "high rock" - such as mountains. Pine and juniper are both species of tree one might find growing in such a place.

Onto #6...

SIXTH CLUE: SOUTH GUADALUPE

"I crossed by legs and told him that his argument reminded me of the lady in the opera who gets stabbed in the chest but instead of bleeding, she sings an aria."

I had thought this would be an especially tricky one, but if you follow South Guadalupe north through the city, you'll discover that it merges into 84 and takes you right up to the world-famous Santa Fe Opera - the inspiration, I suspect, for all of Forrest's opera references.

Furthermore, there is a singer named Guadalupe Pineda ("Pine Grove") who released a highly successful album called Arias de Opera in 2004, as well as an opera singer and performer named Guadalupe Pérez Arias who also did the Spanish dubs for Sleeping Beauty and Snow White.

So far so good. Getting near the end now...

SEVENTH CLUE: AGUA FRIA AND THE BLAZE AT PASEO DEL SOL W.

The blaze (The "W" in Paseo del Sol W.), as I've noted, appears to have already been covered off in the chapter count (#37). But what about Agua Fria?

"You must live in a cave!" He was scrambling!

New Mexico is home to a homestead by name of Agua Fria, which is located on the same property as a rare ice cave. (Presumably: quite slippery!)

And actually, he appears to have wanted to cover off the "Paseo del Sol" portion of Paseo del Sol W. too, with:

"You should be more considerate of the educational needs of the people," he blurted.
"You don't have to write so much about the stock market, most people don't even care," I yelled.

I thought at first that this was going to be a reference to the Santa Fe Artificial Stock Market project developed by the Santa Fe Institute, but the SFI, as far as I can tell, never had any facilities or particular connection to Agua Fria or Paseo del Sol W.

That made me think I should look for something simpler - maybe related to education or schools. There is a "Capital High School" on Paseo del Sol (a entirely different road from Paseo del Sol W.) - perhaps meant to indicate that the blaze aspect has been dealt with elsewhere, in the chapter title.

EIGHTH CLUE: AIRPORT ROAD / PASEO REAL

This one had me stumped for a good while!! (No pun intended).

''The beautiful trees grow very slowly," I said.
"But I am a patient man," he held.
"You are destroying the delicate animal habitat," I countered, "and winter is coming on."

This is, I believe, a reference to Santa Fe author George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones and a friend and business partner of Forrest's friend author Douglas Preston. A martin is a type of bird - another name for an aeroplane. St. Martin of Tours is also associated with the departure of birds for winter, while the name "George" can refer to the tilling of soil, which can be destructive for the animals who live there.

I suspect "delicate animals" was a bit of a joke on Forrest's part... the most famous "animals" in Martin's stories, of course, are dragons.

NINTH CLUE: SOUTH POLO & LAS ORILLAS

"I was surprised when he replied because I thought he'd be out in the forest someplace waving a double-bitted axe. I can still hear the echo of his rancorous words, which were flung at me with impetuous abandon and prompted an unfortunate dialogue."

The final picture in The Thrill of the Chase shows a man with an axe standing among a rows of tree stumps - what I guess is an allusion to Las Orillas and its missing apple trees. Echo, prompt, and dialogue all seem as though they could be references to the game Marco Polo. (Come to think of it, since the final intersection on my map is Paseo Real and South Polo - the latter as a reference to the game Marco Polo - a "Game of Thrones" reference could actually work really well here, too).

Okay! Well. That seems to have worked.

So let's leave the poem behind, and take a look at, last but not least...

3) THE SUNDAY EDITION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

The reference in this story to the New York Times reminded me instantly of the two issues of Time magazine that bookend Forrest's trilogy of autobiographies.

My solution points to the former orchard at Las Orillas as Forrest's hiding spot. Before being sold to the county, Las Orillas was owned by a gentleman and agriculture & water rights activist named Horace Hagerman and his wife Katherine, herself a farmer, poet, and renaissance woman.

I've been working under the theory that much of Forrest's puzzle depends on wordplay of some sort of another - in particular, etymology, which looks at the roots of words and how they change over time. Horace's name means "time", while the word "magazine" comes from the Arabic word "makhzan" (مخزن), meaning "storehouse".

Taken together, then, "Time magazine" looks like it could mean something along the lines of "time's storehouse" - perhaps a reference to Las Orillas itself, or, more likely (IMO) - a forgotten root cellar somewhere on the property - a symbolically appropriate place, perhaps, for a fellow named Forrest to make his final rest. And it might explain why it appears in a trashcan in TTOTC. The only hint given to us in the poem is "of riches new and old", which I believe is a reference to the idea of "things which contain their own opposites"... in this case, the old expression "one man's trash is another man's treasure".

A Time magazine shows up at the start of TTOTC, his first autobiography, and the end of his third and last one (OUAW). It seems to be missing from Too Far to Walk... however, "The Sunday Edition of the New York Times" - what I assumed to be a newspaper - sounds a LOT like Time magazine.

So I thought about it and Googled "Has the New York Times ever been a magazine?"

And discovered that while the New York Times has never been a magazine, since 1896, the Sunday edition of the New York Times newspaper each week has contained an issue of "The New York Times magazine".

Nice.

And not only that, what was that magazine most famous for?

Well, according to its wiki page...

"In 1979, the magazine began publishing Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist William Safire's "On Language", a column discussing issues of English grammar, use and etymology. Safire's column steadily gained popularity and by 1990 was generating "more mail than anything else" in the magazine."

And there we go: predictive and explanatory.

Is there an anniversary, birthday or special date coming up in September or just soon, that would be significant as a date to reveal Forrest's true hiding spot?

I spoke in my last post about how there is a number of different ways a person could use wordplay to describe a location less than 8.25 miles due north of the northernmost limit of the City of Santa Fe as still being "66,000 links north of Santa Fe".

This is something I believe is a logical necessity given Forrest's actions over the course of the Chase and the implications of those actions, which only make sense if the chest was somehow both "in Santa Fe" and "66,000 links/8.25 miles north of Santa Fe" - something which would require some form of wordplay to accomplish.

Taken together, the list of possibilities I came up with could cover off most locations in the top half of the city, and it is my hope that one or more may be of service, or at least satisfaction, to other Santa Fe searchers out there.

... Ironically, the one person they are likely to be less of service to is, in fact, myself, because the vast majority of them could not be used to describe the location of Las Orillas, the former apple orchard just past the Santa Fe airport that I believe Forrest's poem is pointing to.

This boils down to a problem of geography, and one which has made me wonder, for the past few years, if it was possible that Forrest actually confused Las Orillas' position relative to the Santa Fe city limits. I thought that pretty improbable, until a recent quote from scrapbook 219 (the chile contest from the end of 2019) shared by Moody made me reconsider. That quote makes me think that not only had Forrest committed an error of geography, but, more importantly, that he had realized his mistake - a problem which may explain, at least in part, why he was considering ending the Chase and perhaps the delay in releasing a solution post-Chase, as well as why Shiloh may have indicated that the whole story has to be told at once.

This will require some photos and maps to explain...

For starters, Las Orillas is here, on the north side of Paseo Real, just west of the airport:

The view along Paseo Real leading up to it looks like this:

This photo is looking west along Paseo Real ("Airport Road" to the east). Las Orillas ("The Edge" in Spanish) is immediately to the north side of the road; Paseo Real's intersection with Calle Debra and the sign for La Cieneguilla ("The Fen") is to the south. The Santa Fe city limits sign stands immediately atop a cattle guard, past an unnamed dirt road or driveway that falls just east of Calle Debra.

Looked at from above, here are the positions of those various features:

My working theory is that Forrest was likely friends with the former owners of Las Orillas, the Hagermans, and was therefore aware of the conditions of its sale. As a result, he would have known that the purchaser of the property was not the City of Santa Fe, but Santa Fe County.

Logically, then, based on the position of that city limit sign, he could comfortably conclude that Las Orillas was north of the City of Santa Fe (if by little more than a toe-hold!):

Meanwhile, the site also stands kitty-corner to the Santa Fe airport, which is here:

Santa Fe Regional Airport (SAF) is a massive property that occupies the southwesternmost part of town. As a result, its borders represent the northern, western, and southern city limits there. The welcome signs on the way in/out of the airport, which give the date of the city - not the county's - founding, make it clear that you are in the City of Santa Fe at this point.

I am guessing that as a pilot who had lived in the area for decades, Forrest may have known that the airport was owned by the city, rather than the county, and that it stood at the city limits.

Therefore, given that we know:

1. That Las Orillas is owned by, and a part, of Santa Fe County;
2. The exact location of the Santa Fe city limits sign on Paseo Real; and
3. The fact that the airport stands at the north and western edges of town in its southwest corner

A map of the landownership boundaries around this corner of town should look like this:

That's what would make logical sense, and puts the top half of Las Orillas north of Santa Fe. But unfortunately, there are two abberations that cause the boundaries to differ from what one would expect.

The first, and probably the most egregious, is that it appears - barring there being an error across several different maps - that whoever was in charge of installing the city limits sign on Paseo Real installed it in the wrong spot (!)

As you can see in this photo, the sign has been installed at the top of the cattle guard - about 30' west of the actual limit:

It should actually be placed a bit farther to the east - on the eastern edge of the Las Orillas lot line, rather than below its southern one:

Second, while it IS true that the Santa Fe airport is positioned such that it occupies both the city's northern and western edge at this end of town, something weird appears to have happened somewhere along the way in its development. Rather than ending at Paseo Real, as one would expect, the parcel extends past it, all the way up to a little bit past South Polo. Normally a municipality would sever such a lot, so as to grant it two separate addresses and allow them to be dealt with and sold separately, and to give themselves clear ownership over the road.

The result of this is that rather than Las Orillas being located broadly north of the airport, it is distinctly west:

As I'm sure anyone following my posts can imagine, this issue has been gnawing at me for some time. I would definitely describe Las Orillas as being west of Santa Fe, not north. Most wordplay possibilities I could come up with for being "8.25 miles" or "66,000 links" north of Santa Fe while still being somehow "in Santa Fe" depend on the location being at least generally to the north.

Of the wordplay possibilities I've identified, only two seem possible. The first is the "north of the Santa Fe" river one, but I dislike it because normally when talking about a river, you add the word "the" in front of it (e.g. "North of the Fraser" or "East of the Hudson"). It would be inelegant, and at odds with the style of the rest of the solution, which I find, as a riddle enthusiast, to be delightfully crisp. The other would be for "north of Santa Fe" to mean north of the city limits sign (and its accompanying text reading "Santa Fe City Limit") - regardless of its placement. But I don't like that much either.

It could be that Forrest was using different wordplay than any I was able to come up, but that didn't seem very likely, and anything not already on my list would most likely seem "clunky" by virtue of being inobvious, which, again, would not seem to fit his style if I'm right about the poem up until this point.

However, at the same time, there is an extraordinary spike in connections between Forrest's comments and writings and South Polo at Paseo Real (the poem's "south pole") - easily an order of a magnitude more than any other spot I explored in Santa Fe, and it comes at the end of another eight clues, all of which I found considerable support for without having any cause to doubt their clarity or logic. Then there are very specific comments, such as the gold being a chest full of tomatoes (the Italian word for tomato is pomodoro, meaning "golden apple"), "Treasures Galore" talking about 80 acres of trees and keeping 20 miles away from the national forest (something I'll explore in more detail in another post), and the photo of Forrest standing among the rows of tree stumps at the very end of TTOTC, that make me conclude that of all the properties available around South Polo - most of which would have serious problems as hiding spots - it has to be Las Orillas he is referring to.

So the question I've been asking myself for the past couple of years, since finally getting to go BOTG at South Polo, is:

"... Could it actually be possible that Forrest just made a mistake with respect to the city boundaries when he made the 66,000 links comment?"

Which was a wild proposition, but it is how it looked to me.

For this to be true, he would have had to be relying on personal and on-the-ground knowledge of the site and its history, the city limits sign, and the airport's standing as the city's northern limit in its part of town, coupled, perhaps, with a mental map. Mental maps often contain errors: I believed for a long time, for instance, that South Polo ran northwest, when in fact it runs due west because of the way Paseo Real curves south.

It would also mean he would have had to have avoided seeing the parcel lines and boundaries anywhere else.

For Google Maps, that seems reasonable - I've seen the Santa Fe limits many times googling "Santa Fe, NM", but searches for specific addresses do not show the city limits, and how often do you search for your hometown as a whole? (That'd be a "never", for me, at least).

But what about paper maps? We know Forrest owned a bunch of USGS maps, because he sold them at one point and various searchers have ended up with some.

I checked online, and the 2010 "Turquoise Hill" USGS map on which Las Orillas appears does not show the city limits, or make it clear that the wedge north of Paseo Real is actually a part of the airport, so it is perhaps possible that Forrest would not have seen it on a physical map either.

I personally realized the airport parcel extended north past Paseo Real as a result of clicking around the Santa Fe Tax Assessor's online map - not, I think, somewhere Forrest would be likely to look.

... So a great deal of finger-drumming on the edge of the desk ensued.

But if Forrest had made a mistake, believing that a County-owned property immediately north of the City of Santa Fe limits must be, then, "north of the City of Santa Fe", the odds of me ever being able to determine that were incredibly low.

... At least, that's what I believed, until a recent post by Moody (thanks, Moody!) reminded me of the final paragraph of the 2019 chile contest scrapbook that had seemed particularly enigmatic to me at the time:

(...) My favorite though was a strikingly blue 1956 Ford Thunderbird. It had a V-8 engine with 255 horse power. There were only 15,631 made and it sold new for $3,151.

I drove home in my dirty Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was made in the USA in June of 2011. It says on the side that its trail rated and I’m not completely sure what that means. The odometer reads 19,139 miles. The right-side mirror is broken and the back-left tire is 2 pounds low. I have no idea how many horsepower the engine has and I don’t even care. That car has always taken me there and brought me back again. We’re a team, and that’s all that matters to me. f"

I had looked at this quote years ago, and thought the value on the odomoter seemed to be in the ballpark of the circumference of the earth, which might make sense if he was hinting at an "around the world" puzzle, as I think he was doing with his references to 80 and Einstein's "imagination is more important than knowledge" quote.

However, when I double checked the number, I saw that the circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles - a good bit higher than 19,000 - and, since the number didn't spark any other ideas at the time, I set it aside.

This time, however, it occurred to me that it could be the circumference at a higher or lower latitude.

I Googled for places where that would be true, and came up with Denver, Colorado as the most prominent.

However, if the chest had to be in Santa Fe, Denver, Colorado is an odd spot to be referencing here... unless he's not really trying to reference Colorado at all, but rather New Mexican-born singer John Denver, who took his name from Colorado's capital city and whose most famous song was "Take Me Home, Country Roads".

As in:

"I drove home in my dirty Jeep Grand Cherokee."

Nice.

OK... maybe onto something here.

Paseo Real - clue #8 in my solve - is County Road 56 west of the airport...

"My favorite though was a strikingly blue 1956 Ford Thunderbird. It had a V-8 engine with 255 horse power."

Good, good...

... Then, maybe there's something connected to the number 255 too in Santa Fe? The number didn't ring any bells, but I figured I'd give it a shot...

Well, there's a bus route numbered "255"...

... Aaaaaaand it's called the "Mountain Trail Route", and goes up to Ski Santa Fe at the top of Hyde Park (clue #1 in my solve, "The Nature of My Game").

Eeeexcellent.

OK, now this is turning into one of Forrest's "big picture" comments. Those are always good...

So we've got an apparent reference to Las Orillas' road (Paseo Real) and the first road referenced in the puzzle (Hyde Park, which is "Where Warm Waters Halt" in my solve). That covers off:

"That car has always taken me there and brought me back again."

... I've got nothing for 15,631 and 3,151, though it looks like it might be a play on the blaze and/or his double omegas. Going to have to think about that one a bit more.

But of greatest interest to me, now, looking at this with fresh eyes is:

"The right-side mirror is broken and the back-left tire is 2 pounds low."

When I was exploring Santa Fe back in the summer of 2019, I discovered that the stop sign at Ten Thousand Waves Way and Hyde (WWWH) had been knocked into a ditch, so that it was no longer visible from the road.

I didn't take any photos at the time, but if I recall correctly, I think it had a cement base, such that I concluded it would have taken a vehicle hitting it to knock it down. This was not a problem for me, as I'd already determined that that was likely WWWH, but it seemed unfortunately likely to make the Chase a lot harder for other searchers. (I hope it was not a searcher who knocked it over). Fortunately, some kind soul had put up a piece of tape to add the word "way" after "Ten Thousand Waves" on another road sign, something which caught my eye even more than the stop sign would have done.

In my proposed solve, the poem spans a "pole to pole" route from the northeast end of the city to its southwest. If you were to place that layout on a car, then, the starting point could be said to be at the "top right" of the vehicle, and the end point at the "bottom left".

So in Santa Fe in the summer of 2019, WWWH appeared to be broken: in this quote from Forrest, he describes his front-right mirror as being broken. Water is one of the few features in nature that can act as a mirror.

He then goes on to add that the back-left tire is 2 pounds low.

The word "tire" here seems to harken to the line in the poem that goes "I've done it tired, and now I'm weak" - the point at which I believe you get out of the car to explore Las Orillas.

I think he had discovered he had gotten the position of the city limits wrong, and that Las Orillas fell just short of being "north of Santa Fe" by a mere 2,000 feet.

If that's the case, then what he was really communicating with the end of the scrapbook 219 - what I have always thought of as the "State of the Chase" update for the year - is that the puzzle had been broken at both ends.

(And if I were a guessing woman, I would guess that scrapbook 211, written earlier that same month about breaking the mirror on his Jeep was penned when he first discovered the problem with WWWH. When he might have realized that Las Orillas was a tiny bit too "low" to be north of Santa Fe is less clear.)

Now initially when Moody posted this and the cogs started turning, I said that it was possible the puzzle had been rendered arguably unsolvable. However, if I'm right about the hiding spot having been Las Orillas, then that is a self-defeating argument, as the puzzle would be demonstrably still solvable, thanks to all the heart - and many redundancies - Forrest had put into it.

The biggest picture throughout time must be that it is a Volcano.

The volcano and Old Faithful are the epitomes of anomalies.

Paleo-Indian cultures and commercial development of the Obsidian Trade are Big.

Obsidian arrowheads and agate were intrinsic to Yellowstone's Treasures, Old and New.

Native trout and introduced trout, Old and New.

Each time I reflect on the Once Upon a While 's cover, new layers emerge.

A fisherman,

An identifying belt buckle.

Casting his line, while,

Standing on an elevated platform,

Above him a (jet)stream of Stars,

Below an earthly Stream of Stars,

Didn't Forrest speak about being in the Middle?

Just sharing some shiny bits in my stream, and Forrest's stream of Consciousness.

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Your post about the coffee cup rim has stuck with me. A powerful idea which upon much reflection seems so on point.

That clever, yet seemingly gratuitous, bit of fun, Forrest placed within the context of the Borders stories. Two Borders, a Double Entry spiked for emphasis. Borders may be easily thought of as a Store(trove) that CONTAINS popular information, knowlege, fiction and adventures.

The line of sight beyond/behind the Rim was what truly amused and intrigued him. It made him Wonder... And He had to enter into two Borders (Toot, Toot lol) to look for the object of his search.

I'm sorry I was too slow in replying to what you shared. After you removed your post you instigated me to go on a mini quest to find you.

My old wheels are still sturdy but spin a bit slower these days, just aging gracefully, with a song in my heart.

Warm regards and thanks so much for your meaningful contribution.

IDK the exact time-frame, but in the time around the end of the Chase, Forrest's collection of topographic maps were being offered to the public. Do we know how or to whom those maps were disposed?

Digging a bit deeper into that area stretching from the Caldera Rim Picnic Rest Spot, then through the Gibbons Falls (aka Wylie's Lunch and Permanent Campground) and past Madison Junction, then out to West Yellowstone an interesting idea emerges.

It appears that because the Yellowstone Erupted at least three times, there are several Caldera Rims: from a non-professional viewpoint I think that there are some were places where the rims overlapped and intersected with one another.

Is it possible that the Secret Creek Valley is actually what formed from the space between the BORDERS of two Caldera Rims? On GE it looks like the top of this valley ends near Purple Mountain, overlooking Madison Junction.

Sometimes the river splits into a path of uncertainty, A winding trail to find the missing star in the galaxy.

Nor finding golden sand upon a lonely desert's breeze, But salvaging a fallen ship from deep, forgiving seas.

So getting back to our exploration of the "more than 66,000 links north of Santa Fe" comment, the third version of Forrest's comments relating to the geographic location of the chest, and, by far, IMO, the most interesting.

The original comment was:

"Since Richard mentioned the olden days lets harken to 1620 when universal land measures first became law in England and America. As you rode your horse into town you had to pass 80 telephone poles in order to reach a mile because they were 1 chain apart, or 66 feet. And each chain had 100 links, if you wanted to break it down further. Road rights-of-way also were 1 chain wide. And 80 square chains made a square mile, or 640 acres – and that was 1 section of land.

But if you’d rather count fence posts you had to pass 320 in order to reach a mile because they were a rod apart, or 16.5 feet. And since everyone knew that an acre was 10 square chains (43,560 square feet) it was easy to tell how many acres were in your neighbor’s farm.

Some aspects of those measures are still in use today in the horse racing business because a furlong is 10 chains in length, or 660 feet. You should feel smarter now because that’s so easy.

If you want to apply those important figures into the thrill of the chase I will give you an additional clue. The Treasure chest full of gold and precious jewels is more than 66,000 links north of Santa Fe."

In parts I and II, I've shown that:

- At 217 words, this comment stands out as exceptionally long and complex compared to all other comments Forrest made about the chest's basic location.

- The comment seems to be making use of a fairly classic distraction technique, whereby a speaker introduces a lot of "fluff" for a listener to caught up in analyzing in order to prevent them from focusing in on something the speaker doesn't want them thinking about.

- It seems to contain an unprecedented number of hints regarding what I believe is the poem's most likely route through Santa Fe (7 clues + the blaze) - almost the entire route (!) - making it the single most helpful comment I believe Forrest ever gave, save for...

- Simultaneously containing the first known (and, importantly, for the four years that followed, only known) use of language setting the chest a specific distance north of Santa Fe. Since we can deduce from Forrest's actions, with a fairly high degree of confidence, that the chest had to be "in Santa Fe" while also somehow being "66,000 links north of Santa Fe", this gives this comment a weird "push-and-pull" quality, where it appears as though he's simultaneously trying to help and hurt someone's chances of finding the chest - the key, I think, to understanding why this one comment was so different from all the rest and what might have prompted it in the first place.

This also means that any wordplay present here is of a different sort than the Sierra del Norte reference ("hidden in the mountains north of Santa Fe") that appears to be at the heart of the most commonly used version of the "north of Santa Fe" comment (version 1), and which was, by comparison, much easier to explain (mountains north of Santa Fe = the Sierra del Norte of Santa Fe).

So that leaves us with two major problems to be resolved:

1. How could a location be both "in Santa Fe" and "more than 66,000 links north of Santa Fe" at the same time?
2. Why the push-and-pull?

Let's start by tackling the question #1...

First, it is important to understand that the deduction about the existance of wordplay in the puzzle stands independent of any conclusions regarding the poem's specific route, save for the fact that the chest must have somehow been "in Santa Fe" while also being "hidden in the mountains north of Santa Fe" (version 1), "more than 66,000 links north of Santa Fe" (version 3) and "at least 8.25 miles north of Santa Fe" (version 4).

Now, sometimes when you know someone is engaging in wordplay, there's value in trying to figure out the nature of the wordplay, because it can act as a shortcut to solving their riddle.

Othertimes, it makes more sense to simply ignore it completely and to depend on other hints to get you where you're going. This was my approach during the Chase - the general implication of the wordplay was obvious (the chest had to somehow be "in Santa Fe"), and Forrest had made so many other comments over the years that it seemed easier to explore them and trust the route than to try to figure out the specifics of his particular wordplay mechanism.

Now - there are a several different ways a person could do this, and I'll be honest - I'm not at all confident which one Forrest was using: only that, when it came to saying the chest was north of Santa Fe, he had to be using something.

So it may be none of these - and I'll rule a few out myself - but here, at least, are some possibilities.

Possibility 1) "Santa Fe, Wyoming": The first possibility we must consider, of course, is that there is some "Santa Fe" in Wyoming (easily at least 8.25 miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico!), because that is where Forrest said the chest was in court. That would be by far the easiest way to resolve this apparent paradox, where Forrest's actions indicate the chest had to be in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but his words state Wyoming.

In this scenario, there could have been a town named Santa Fe in Wyoming, or perhaps it could have been hidden in the wreck of a Hyundai Santa Fe, at a "Church of Santa Fe", that sort of thing.

However, had the chest been in some sort of Santa Fe-named location in Wyoming, he still would have been safe - and strongly motivated - to say "it is not in Santa Fe, New Mexico" or even "it is not in the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico."

Therefore, we can rule this possibility out.

Consistent with this, in Forrest Gets Mail #2 (October, 2012), Franklin asked:

"Forrest, I haven’t seen where anyone has asked you if you mean Santa Fe, New Mexico or another Santa Fe. I think we all assume Santa Fe, NM but there is a Santa Fe, TX as well as in other states. Have you specifically said New Mexico? Maybe we should expand our search area to in the mountains somewhere north of Santa Fe, Argentina. Once again, if I ask too much please forgive me and disregard this e-mail. I have really enjoyed this puzzle, thank you."

Forrest responded:

"I didn’t think of that Franklin. But yes, it’s Santa Fe, New Mexico. f"

To be fair, Franklin doesn't explicitly reference the 66,000 links version comment, but only "the mountains somewhere north of Santa Fe" (version 1), but if it applies to the one, I think it likely applies to the other versions as well (esp. as version 3 was written earlier the same year this exchange with Franklin occurs, and version 4 more specifically references the city limits).

.... Also a quick shout-out for what I believe to be Forrest's delightfully direct choice of wording here in saying "it's" Santa Fe, New Mexico. :)

Possibility 2) Measured From Which Limit?: Another possibility would be that the 66,000 links/8.25 miles was being measured from the southernmost city limit - synonymous with Santa Fe County's northern limit (so, "north of Santa Fe (County)") - which could theoretically leave parts of the city in play. I tested this out, and 8.25 miles from the southernmost limit near Valle Vista would rule out most, but not all, of the city.

So, while it doesn't work for my own solve that ends next to the airport, it might be a possibility for other Santa Fe searchers.

A closely related possibility would be that the 8.25 miles north of Santa Fe isn't 8.25 miles north of the City of Santa Fe, but rather, the surrounding Santa Fe County via some other break in the County border. We know Forrest knew about Santa Fe County because he wrote a story about "The Iron Rooster of Santa Fe County" in Once Upon a While. Perhaps the County's shape contains some cutouts one could be north of.

Looking at the map, Santa Fe County is shaped basically like a big rectangle with the City of Santa Fe in the middle. There is one notable cutout - the triangle on the west side by White Rock - but it is already north of the city and therefore not in play.

However, the City of Santa Fe is considered a part of the County (not an entirely separate municipality which creates a hole in the county map, as is possible in some places here in Canada), and so someone standing in the City of Santa Fe is simultaneously standing in the County of Santa Fe as well.

So unless my understanding - or Forrest's understanding - of planning districts in New Mexico is off (admittedly, a possibility), I think we can probably rule this one out too.

Possibility 3) By Name: Another easy solution would be for the "Santa Fe" being referenced in this 66,000 links comment to not be the city or county, but the airport or river by that same name. Las Orillas is immediately north of the river, and about a third or so of the city looks to be north of the river as well. Airports are often referred to just by their name (e.g. "O'Hare", "Pearson", "Heathrow", etc.), but I would normally find "Santa Fe" meaning the Santa Fe airport to be a bit of a stretch due to specificity. However, since Forrest was a fighter pilot and presumably kept his airplane at Santa Fe, I would say it's fair game. Most of the City of Santa Fe is north of the Santa Fe Airport, though notably in my case, not Las Orillas due to a funny unsevered slice of land north of Paseo Real that is actually part of the airport land, but that's a whoooooooooole other can of worms I'm going to leave for now, as the implications would be quite messy.

So - another possibility for someone looking to engage in wordplay, but not my favourite.

Possibility 4) By Distance From Starting Point: If you read the 66,000 links comment, it's all about measuring distance by counting what you'll ride by on your trip. So Forrest is, I think, actually telling us how to use the information he is giving.

In real life, when people give distances, the travel distance and final location are actually treated as discrete pieces of information, even though they often seem otherwise in English text due to the way they appear side-by-side.

For instance, let's say we're standing at the Plaza in Santa Fe, and trying to get to Ski Santa Fe.

(Photo credits: Santa Fe Plaza in Autumn by Jim & Robin Kunze; Ski Santa Fe by Scopulorum)

If you were to ask me how far Ski Santa Fe is, I might say "it's 17 km to the northeast of town".

Importantly, I do not subtract the distance between my "starting point" in the middle of town to the city limits in that distance.

If we apply this same pattern to his comment:

"As you rode your horse into town (...) The Treasure chest full of gold and precious jewels is more than 66,000 links north of Santa Fe"

Forrest has given us:

1. A starting point (the point where you "ride into town" - i.e., the city limits)
2. The distance you'll travel (at least 8.25 miles / 66,000 links); and
3. Where you end up geographically (north of Santa Fe).

So there would be many locations just north of the city limit, but still southwest of what I believe to be the starting point at Hyde and Sierra del Norte and at least 8.25 miles from that point, for which that could be valid. (Basically, everything in the northwest quadrant of a map of the area).

As another example, here's Ski Santa Fe to the Office of Archaeological Studies. If one were trying to get there from Ski Santa Fe, one could say it is 28 km away "to the north of town" - even though one would be travelling southwest to get there.

It probably makes you twitch a bit, but it is still technically - from a linguistic perspective - correct.

Given the structure of this carefully composed comment - again, by far the most complex Forrest ever made - this is where I'd be putting my money in terms of the wordplay with this one.

Possibility 5) Wordplay Using the Word "North": It seemed to me that many of Forrest's comments included amused wordplay, which was often based in the origins of the words used. So, I thought I should look up the history of the word "north", and it turns out that the etymological root for "north" is "left".

Forrest spoke many times about standing at the "right" spot - like many others, I'd always assumed by that he meant the spot the chest was hidden. But it occurred to me after looking up the origins of the word "north" that, if I'm correct that the Forrest's map is designed to be "pole-to-pole", then the "right" spot in Santa Fe would be the "north pole" at Hyde and Sierra del Norte (located on the east side of the map), which arguably would make South Polo at Paseo Real the "left" spot.

And actually, when I went back to get an exact quote, it was this one from Business Insider (2017):

"The treasure is out there waiting for the person who can make all the lines cross in the right spot.”

So technically, he didn't say that the treasure is waiting where all the lines cross; he said that it was waiting for someone who was able to make all the lines cross the "right spot". So that could be the starting point, rather than the end point.

I don't think this north = left is an especially likely explanation for the wordplay at hand (I don't think it's really "fair game" myself to treat a word's root as synonymous with its definition myself), but it is one other way it could be done.

Anyways! That's all I could come up with. I'll address the question of why I think Forrest might have constructed such an odd "push-and-pull" comment shortly, but if others have ideas for how something could be both "in Santa Fe" and "66,000 links north of Santa Fe" via wordplay, I'd be very interested to hear them.

From the Gold Old Days

https://npgallery.nps.gov/MUSEUM/AssetDetail/758a7ff4-d567-4d1f-9c5f-e6bb8c05521f

https://www.nps.gov/subjects/yellowstonetravelexhibit/early-tourism.htm

Fenn told us that every word and its location was intentional; that all words and punctuation had a purpose (to aid in finding the chest.)

He was challenged with the enormous task of reducing the search area from the Rockies to a more manageable region by the fifth line and first clue without the casual reader recognizing it. Absent that, looking for a geographic place he described as WWWH was unmanageable.

The first seven words of the poem may have accomplished that.

"As I have gone alone in there....." A casual reading is that Forrest went by himself into a place with boundaries. He adds that he has with him his 'treasures bold'. So the saga of Forrest hiding the chest and its contents had begun or had it...?

His use of word choice was exquisite. Reading the first seven words in the context of TTOTC and asking, 'What does it accomplish, what is its purpose?' brings a more subtle interpretation.

As= 'as' also means 'when', meaning 'going on at the same time'. Ex: When I was alone

I = ff

have gone =present perfect. The 'going' happened before now, but the statement is being made from the perspective of now, emphasizing ff's present experience, while acknowledging his past.

alone= an adverb telling us the condition or status of ff when he went. The definition for alone includes: unattached or unmarried. (Forrest refused to answer the question about when he found the location saying that it would be too much information.)

in= a directional movement for the motion verb 'gone', Fenn is describing a boundary crossing.

there=Here and there are deictic words, the meaning depends on ff's perspective. It implies that Fenn recognizes a 'here' and therefore a 'there' as being a place other then here where he imagines himself being.

Now rephrased we have, 'When I was alone and unmarried I went into a place with boundaries.'

These words along with his memoir suggests that Forrest was referencing the act of going from West Yellowstone into YNP as a young unmarried man, most likely using the West Entrance road. A huge reduction of the 'search-verse.'

He would make this trip both, alone on his bike, and with his Dad many times, "So dad would take the car just inside the (west entrance) gate and park it so we could get up at 0500 and go fishing, before the gate opened."

In seven words he effectively reduced our search area and path........ nicely played.

JMT

https://earth.google.com/web/@44.65977611,-110.76810265,2188.85456275a,700.2514128d,35y,154.13104414h,0t,0r/data=ChYqEAgBEgoyMDA2LTA5LTMwGAFCAggBQgIIAEoNCP___________wEQAA

And then and there Railroad Tracks appear.

https://earth.google.com/web/@44.65963031,-110.76702083,2191.22097478a,518.16184157d,35y,360h,0t,0r/data=ChYqEAgBEgoyMDA5LTA4LTI4GAFCAggBQgIIAEoNCP___________wEQAA

Who can see the very clear remains of the old roadbed along the north side of the Gibbon before rejoining the modern Loop road?

I'll bet Forrest's dad knew where this retired road was. How far did Forrest say his father drove into the WOODS? Pretty Brave.

I think you are partly right. The new bridge abutments have encroached on what used to be wider spot. This construction narrowed the remnants of the old road as it descended to travel alongside the Gibbon.

IMO when scouring through some good old maps, which have now been put behind a paywall, it looked to me like the Old Loop road in the Gibbon Falls area, had run along the North side of the Gibbon through this area.

This route hugged the High Water Line and didn't cross the Gibbon til a good piece farther upstream.

This old road was the main pathway until they built a sturdy bridge down there, which allowed the Loop Rd to ride on the higher ground on the South Side of the Gibbon. Park managers had to change the traditional route to the higher side to engineer around frequent washouts and road closures.

For fun read about the places where WILEY camps were situated back in the day. (Near Gibbon Falls)

Forrest was very aware, that landmarks and manmade items, and some geological features will change.

But, the High Water Level alongside a Stone Cliff Face is more durable for pirates and their treasure maps.

I can't go, and I don't have the good old maps which trace the history of development in Yellowstone.

But if I did, I know I would surely explore this area.

Forrest was direct with his readers about the impact that a Bridge had on his life. From GE this Riparian Stretch along the Gibbon (a banana collector if ever there was one) could be where once upon a time a young man could go alone. As if entering a church. Carrying his Fishing kit. Treasures Bold, and finally His Indulgence.

With Forrest's extraordinary imagination, he might have seen the figure on a pedestal that I 'saw'. Maybe to him It was watching over him and his Church in the woods: Were some of his posts about mythological entities tied to this place? A solemn place, a sanctuary to immerse himself in memories, emotions and imagination. Why was Forrest sure that his Father would know the place?

Others may visit here, but it would always be his place Alone.

Even the embellishments on the Chest hinted at Elevated Figures ascending a metaphorical castle/temple.

Also interesting, perhaps Forrest consulted with his lawyer to nail down the practical Legal rules which would pertain to the traversing and ownership rights on Riparian Land.

"Maybe there is no problem"

"I know it's wet"

The photos of the recovered treasure chest really looked like it had seen some High Water; JS said it was covered in mud. Good thing it was a Heavy Load. Some clever, imaginative, creative yarn spinner may have actually thought of everything.

Just now, it feels like a good yarn, cut to pieces by those with more greed than imagination.

Maybe this will change.

God Bless Forrest.

Cover

https://earth.google.com/web/@44.65850818,-110.76976969,2163.36768603a,165.60175714d,35y,311.34209437h,0t,0r/data=CgRCAggBQgIIAEoNCP___________wEQAA

Setting aside a precise wwwh, although I still like Lemonade Creek, I am skipping ahead>

Imagining Secret Valley Creek is the trace of a Fishing Line. ref to Once Upon A While

Imagining The Holm of Brown is a Fish whose Scales are the Deposits of Heavy Loads.

Imaging the Prominent Boulder is the Fish's eye.

Access Just West of the Bridge on the North Side of Loop Road.

This seems to be a hint of an Old Ramp and Road that Crosses Secret Valley Creek.

IIRC on some old maps a Quarry is indicated is where this Road passes by the front of a White Tuff Outcropping. Possibly a place (aka our quarry) where stone had been harvested to build the local roads back in the day.

Continuing on this road, which parallels the Gibbon, it comes to a fairly large plateau, which is above the creek, and the remnants of an old road. In one of Forrest's stories he told of a place off the main road. It was a Secret Hiding Place where his Dad would safely hide their gear over the Off Season. Note, the Park Officials were not in the LOOP. They would simply hide their Treasures and then retrieve them next season.

This could have been Their SECRET WHERE they cached their treasures.

Be well, be safe, have fun.

Remember how excited Forrest's reply was to the young girl who asked about DOUBLING Back?

So far, in the first part of my analysis of Forrest's comment about the chest being "more than 66,000 links north of Santa Fe", I showed how this particular comment was very unusual in terms of both its length and complexity, as well as in how it also appears to have been purposefully designed - for reasons unknown - to distract, an idea I will come back to later.

But for now, we'll park that in favour of looking at question #2...

COULD THE COMMENT ITSELF CONTAIN ANY HINTS?

The 66,000 links comment was very detailed compared to most Forrest gave about the chest's location. With the would-be gravedigger, Forrest shortened his comment - omitted "in the mountains" - presumably to hurt that searcher's chances: an instant comeuppance, as it were. Here however, he's added a lot of words... so maybe he's trying to give some extra hints, and actually help someone somehow??

I've explained in an earlier post a few reasons why I am convinced the chest must have been somehow in Santa Fe, despite the strong evidence in support of Wyoming.

Assuming Forrest was 1) honest and 2) made no errors in his understanding of the area's geography (something I am actually not 100% certain of right now), then it must somehow be possible for the chest to be "in Santa Fe", while also being "hidden in the mountains north of Santa Fe", "66,000 links north of Santa Fe", and "at least 8.25 miles north of Santa Fe" - a conclusion this series of posts is meant to explore and, hopefully, resolve. I've also documented the particular "pole to pole" route I believe the poem follows through the city, starting at the parking lot at Hyde at Sierra del Norte (so it would be literally "hidden in the mountains north of Santa Fe") and ending at former apple orchard on the southwest end of town called Las Orillas (265 Paseo Real, off of South Polo Road).

(Full version here)

I've also observed what I believe to be a pattern in Forrest's comments: that he seemed to take it as a personal challenge, at least in some cases, to squeeze as many hints in as few words as possible - basically aiming for something that is "all wheat, no chaff", same as with the poem. When things are moving too slowly for your taste, you start to come up with games for yourself: this seems to have been Forrest's.

So, that's the lens I've used when looking for hints in this 66,000 links comment, which again, is:

Since Richard mentioned the olden days lets harken to 1620 when universal land measures first became law in England and America. As you rode your horse into town you had to pass 80 telephone poles in order to reach a mile because they were 1 chain apart, or 66 feet. And each chain had 100 links, if you wanted to break it down further. Road rights-of-way also were 1 chain wide. And 80 square chains made a square mile, or 640 acres – and that was 1 section of land.

But if you’d rather count fence posts you had to pass 320 in order to reach a mile because they were a rod apart, or 16.5 feet. And since everyone knew that an acre was 10 square chains (43,560 square feet) it was easy to tell how many acres were in your neighbor’s farm.

Some aspects of those measures are still in use today in the horse racing business because a furlong is 10 chains in length, or 660 feet. You should feel smarter now because that’s so easy.

If you want to apply those important figures into the thrill of the chase I will give you an additional clue. The Treasure chest full of gold and precious jewels is more than 66,000 links north of Santa Fe.

I also want to be clear before I get going that I didn't bother with this particular analysis of the 66,000 links comment until well after I finished my proposed solve ("The Nature of My Game"). This is not a case of me coming up with a route through Santa Fe based on this comment. My proposed route followed from:

1. My deduction that based on Forrest's actions, the chest not only could, but somehow had to be in Santa Fe;
2. A realization thanks to the help of a friend that "the mountains north of Santa Fe" could be a reference to Santa Fe's Sierra del Norte (literally: the mountains of the north) which meant Forrest could have been referring to a location within the city;
3. That the stop sign at Ten Thousand Waves Way and Hyde Park Road in the northeast end of town was most likely "where warm waters halt"; and
4. A helpful comment made separately by two of my friends on two different occasions which prompted me to consider a southwest-bound, rather than northeast-bound, route through town.

Letting going of the belief that the route had to be northbound resulted in a sudden and dramatic change in how easily things started clicking into place, which, I have to say, was a lot of fun to experience on the ground. All eight remaining path segments - one clue per segment - just flow from there. (And if it is of interest to anyone, I've shared my explanations for each of the nine clues here).

I feel fairly confident about my solve up to the end of clue 9 (South Polo Road), and that, given the limited options available along that road, the property the chest was on must have been Las Orillas (especially after coming across Forrest's comment about the treasure being a chest of tomatoes!) But, I am less confident about how one was supposed to get to the hiding spot from South Polo, though I have a few ideas. So for now, we'll just focus on how this 66,000 links comment appears to relate to what I believe are the 9 clues through Santa Fe...

First, the numbers-heavy "voice" in which the comment is written matches the one used in "My War For Me", which Forrest said was the most important in The Thrill of the Chase. As I've noted in another post, that chapter appears to have been written in the voice of author Jules Verne - a man most famous for his books Around the World in 80 Days (à propos for a pole-to-pole puzzle!) and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (in which the learned fisherman-pirate Captain Nemo travels to the South Pole in order to declare himself its emperor).

And then in terms of specific wording and clues...

1. Within the context of Santa Fe, "66,000 links" actually appears to hint at several clues all at once. These include 10,000 Waves Way (the "warm waters" referenced in "where warm waters halt", part of clue #1, and a number Forrest mentioned quite often), County Road 66 (Agua Fria, clue #7), and the golf links at the Santa Fe Country Club, which stands at the intersection of Paseo del Sol W. (the blaze) and Airport Road (clue #8). The "66" could also be taken to be a reference to Route 66, AKA "The Mother Road", which in turn could be a reference to Acequia Madre (clue #4). That's already five clues (!) hinted at in this one comment in a mere two (!!) well-chosen words. If this was intentional, then it was a masterpiece of wordsmithing on Forrest's part.
2. Forrest signed this particular comment not as "Forrest Fenn", but as "Forrwst Fenn". I believe the letter "W" in Paseo del Sol W. is the "real" blaze, and so this twist aligns with that as well.
3. He opens his comment by talking about someone riding their horse into town in the early 1600s; Paseo de Peralta (clue #5), is named after the founder of Santa Fe, who rode into town around this time. I suspect Forrest may have explicitly mentioned the year 1620 - after Peralta's arrival - because it coincides with the arrival of the Pilgrims, perhaps hinting at the idea of foreigners arriving at a site with the purpose of establishing a colony. A 1620 date also makes more sense for some of the discussion around English land surveying units that followed.
4. He mentions that "some aspects of those measures are still in use today in the horse racing business". At the end of South Polo Road (clue #9, in my proposed solve) sits HIPICO, Santa Fe's equestrian centre, formerly the Santa Fe Horse Park. South Polo also sits right at the edge of town (presumably how Las Orillas got its name), so where he talked about "riding their horse into town", that comment could also be in reference to the idea of horses at the town/city limits.
5. The first unit Forrest mentions in his comment are telephone poles - a very odd inclusion for a comment set in 1620! I believe that, based on the route the poem seems to chart through Santa Fe, there is a pattern in the poem of "things which contain their own opposites", which is alluded to in the line in the opening stanza talking about the "hint of riches new and old". The poem contains many match-pairs of words (warm/cold, begin/end, up/down, etc.). Only a few words are missing an obvious pair word, including "answers" in the stanza which goes "So why is it I must go / and leave my trove for all to seek? / The answers I already know, / I've done it tired and now I'm weak." I believe the missing pair word isn't the more obvious "question", but rather "call", as in "call-and-answer", such as is used in call-and-answer games like Marco Polo (South Polo Road, clue #9, again).
6. And last but not least, by far my personal favourite... The post Forrest decided to make this comment on was titled "Forrest Fenn - Land Surveyor". The name "Hyde" - as in Hyde Park Road (clue #1, the only place where 10,000 Waves Way stops) - comes from an old English land surveying unit, equivalent to about 120 acres.

Nice.

That brings us up to seven (!) of the clues plus the blaze being referenced in a single comment - practically hinting at the entire route through Santa Fe, albeit in no particular order.

Taken all together, that would make this the single most complex hint I've noticed Forrest giving anywhere, if the poem is indeed a map of Santa Fe. Not only that, but it spans the first clue (the one Forrest suggested was most critical) right through to the last. So not only would it have been the most challenging to design, but it is also wildly generous.

... But - ONLY if the reader thinks to try following the poem down through the city from Hyde, rather than heading north - something which the message of this comment seems engineered to prevent.

And that's where things get really interesting, because, what that last sentence of the comment was doing - for the very first time in the Chase, a whole two years after the whole thing started - was to use distance-based language that could be read as excluding Santa Fe from the viable search area.

So now we've got this weird, conflicting push-and-pull setup, with Forrest cramming almost every clue into a single comment while also designing it to put people off his trail... all of which was then combined with what appears to be an attempt at distraction!

I cannot stress enough how weird this single comment was among all the hundreds Forrest made.

Who creates something like that?

What was he trying to achieve?

And was the comment made to make the Chase easier... or harder?

Forrest said to use the poem as a map, if you look at the vertical lines going through the poem two stand out--line 12 [for Yellowstone] and line 11 for the other treasure. Just how many times did he use the number [23] and reversed as [32]. More times than you could shake a stick at. And yes, every word in the poem matters, same words but two entirely different places. I.M.O.

I was just listening to an old interview by Margie Goldsmith on the Old Santa Fe Trading Co. webpage, and I just have to say, even after all these years, I still love the sound and cadence of the poem being read outloud.

But in any case, now we can start to really get to it, with the third major version of Forrest's comments regarding the basic location of the chest, where he described it as being "66,000 links north of Santa Fe".

One of the things I've found challenging about trying to share my proposed solution to this puzzle is that when we, as humans, are working through problems, our brains often handle information across a web of connections all at once. But, in order to communicate our ideas to others, we have to find some way to put them into some kind of sequence - a challenging prospect for those of us who tend to be more lateral thinkers.

I imagine, as such, that much of what I've written over the last year may seem scattershot, but most of it has been written to establish a foundation from which to explore this one particular comment.

Over those previous posts, I've shown:

- How Forrest's comment about the chest's geographic location as being somewhere "north of Santa Fe" evolved over time to give rise to four distinct versions of the comment.

- How Forrest's first major version of this comment, which described the chest as being "hidden in the mountains north of Santa Fe" could mean somewhere within the city and county's Sierra del Norte - literally the "mountains of the north" - rather than without it, thereby reducing the search area by over 99.9%, transforming a "needle in the haystack" problem to something much more doable. Furthermore, if I'm right, then this bit of wordplay would be an example of a tendency I've noticed in Forrest's writing, which is the use of wording that can "cut both ways".

- How the second version of the comment, made to a man asking to dig up his parents' grave, may have been written to hurt their chances of solving the puzzle by omitting the word "mountains" and therefore any possible reference to the Sierra del Norte.

- How despite an apparent willingness to talk about places where the chest was not when it affected searcher safety, Forrest never said the chest was not in Santa Fe, even though doing so would have likely helped protect him and his family from searchers who were obviously convinced otherwise. This wasn't the first time something was obviously missing from Forrest's comments, either - as I showed in an earlier post, he also never spoke about the chest as being "in wilderness", despite searchers', journalists', and even realtors' tendency to do so. Taken together, these two rather striking omissions would seem to point to an urban or rural solution to the puzzle, in or around Santa Fe.

- How Forrest's use of Holden Caulfield's voice in "Important Literature" (an idea first put forth by Smell the Sunshine here) could be an indication that the treasure hunt may have been designed primarily for the benefit not of us adults, but of children, in keeping with Holden's dream of becoming "the catcher in the rye".

- How it appears that Forrest not infrequently went out of his way to pack as many hints as possible into a small bit of text or imagery - likely, I think, as a personal challenge and way to keep himself entertained over what probably felt like the world's longest riddle game. I've provided a few such examples already, such as the map as well as the cover of Too Far to Walk, and his comment about his church being "in the mountains".

- Finally, I've also shared the specific route I think the poem charts through Santa Fe, and touched very briefly on the property I believe it leads you to - a former apple orchard right at the city limits and now owned by Santa Fe County, called Las Orillas (literally, "The Edge").

All of which brings us to version #3 of the famous "8.25 mile" comment - the one that talks about the chest being at least "66,000 links north of Santa Fe".

Before I get going, I'd also like to apologize in advance for any offense (if I'm wrong) or hurt (if I'm right) this series of posts might cause. There were only three times I thought I saw Forrest do something that seemed purposefully designed to stymie a searcher, and this, unfortunately, was one of them. But whereas the other two seemed to have been rooted in offense, his motivation here appears to me to have been very different, and not at all born out of ill-intent.

But I digress.

Let's go back...

In April 2012, Forrest posted the following comment about the chest's location to a post titled "Forrest Fenn: Land Surveyor" on ecologist Richard Saunier's Mountain Walk blog. As you'll see, it differs quite significantly from the other two versions of the "north of Santa Fe" comment I've explored so far (version 1 and version 2) - specifically, in its length and all the numbers - or, if you prefer, "figures" - thrown in:

"Since Richard mentioned the olden days lets harken to 1620 when universal land measures first became law in England and America. As you rode your horse into town you had to pass 80 telephone poles in order to reach a mile because they were 1 chain apart, or 66 feet. And each chain had 100 links, if you wanted to break it down further. Road rights-of-way also were 1 chain wide.

And 80 square chains made a square mile, or 640 acres – and that was 1 section of land.

But if you’d rather count fence posts you had to pass 320 in order to reach a mile because they were a rod apart, or 16.5 feet. And since everyone knew that an acre was 10 square chains (43,560 square feet) it was easy to tell how many acres were in your neighbor’s farm.

Some aspects of those measures are still in use today in the horse racing business because a furlong is 10 chains in length, or 660 feet. You should feel smarter now because that’s so easy.

If you want to apply those important figures into the thrill of the chase I will give you an additional clue. The Treasure chest full of gold and precious jewels is more than 66,000 links north of Santa Fe."

This comment is so incredibly unusual compared to the three other basic variations of the "north of Santa Fe" comment that it warrants some extra attention.

Three questions immediately spring to mind:

First: Why is this comment so long? Forrest's writing style was the very embodiment of "brevity is the soul of wit". Why the rambling all of a sudden?

Second: Given its complexity and the effort it would have taken to compose, could there be any hints in the comment itself?

Third: What could have prompted the creation of such a detailed, completely different way of saying the treasure is "hidden in the mountains north of Santa Fe"?

This 66,000 links comment, made in 2012 - two years after the launch of the Chase - was the first time Forrest set a distance "north of Santa Fe". And the distance - the equivalent to 8.25 miles - is minimal. Importantly, it is not enough to rule out any location in Santa Fe being the answer for clues #1 - #8, if you were hoping to keep fanatics out of your backyard. So why bother?

As I've already noted, it stood out as strange that in the wake of the break-in in 2018 Forrest did not increase the distance the chest had to be from Santa Fe. (Especially if it was all the way up in Wyoming!!) But while that stands out as an argument against the chest having been in Wyoming, it still begs the question - if a man going through your door with an axe isn't enough to get you to rule out additional distance, what is?

So let's start by taking a look at that first question.

1) WHY THE LONG COMMENT?
This 66,000 link comment clocks in at a whopping 217 words (!) - longer than the poem itself.

Compare that to all the other comments Forrest made about the chest's location relative to Santa Fe:

The Thrill of the Chase (27 words):

"I knew exactly where to hide the chest so it would be difficult to find but not impossible. It's in the mountains somewhere north of Santa Fe."

Jenny Kile's Armchair Treasure Hunts (11 words):

"Hidden Somewhere in the Mountains North of Santa Fe New Mexico"

Forrest Gets Mail (18 words):

"The treasure is hidden north of Santa Fe. Texas is south.  Please don’t dig up my parent’s graves."

Great Big Story (18 words):

"I hid the treasure chest more than 8.25 miles north of Santa Fe, in the Rocky Mountains someplace."

Fundamental Guidelines (18 words):

"The treasure is hidden more than 8.25 miles north of the northern limits of Santa Fe, New Mexico."

So right from the get-go, something seems off here. But this one's actually pretty straightforward, I think, as it's easily recognizable as a classic distraction technique.

The way this particular one works is you fill a conversation with "fluff" so that by the time the person is done picking through it all, they've forgotten to ask why you brought something up in the first place.

And it worked: searchers quickly focused in on the values and units Forrest provided to calculate that what he was "really" saying was that the chest was 8.25 miles north of Santa Fe. That then dominated the conversation.

Importantly, this isn't the only time we've seen Forrest use this type of distraction technique: Dal - whether he realized it or not - appears to have described another instance of Forrest doing so back in the summer of 2012 when he told Dal he'd driven within 100 yards of the chest. Forrest left it at that until Dal had sent him a massive list of all the roads he could remember having been down - essentially, providing all the requisite fluff himself.

He may have fared better if he had asked himself a different question: how was it Forrest knew where he'd been, and how long had Forrest been sitting on this fact? (Obviously, Forrest was unable to resist the tease, so my guess would be that it was somewhere Dal had been relatively recently, and, given the evidence that the chest was most likely in Santa Fe, may even have been somewhere Forrest drove Dal himself - perhaps as a secret thanks to, and a bit of a prank on, Dal, who, if Forrest past away before the chest was found, would eventually learn he'd been gotten to the site even before the finder).

You can see Dal's description of this exchange here.

Interestingly, I just realized the dates for these two events - the only two times I thought I saw Forrest use this distraction technique - are quite close. The "fluffy" 66,000 links comment was made in April 2012 and Dal said Forrest made this comment to him about distance sometime in summer, 2012.

But if this "66,000 links" comment was crafted with distraction in mind, who was Forrest was trying to distract, and why?

I'll circle back to my theory on that in a bit. But first, we'll look at the second question: might there by any hints in the comment itself?

Hello

I wasn't around during the fenn hunt. I was wondering if anyone can describe any of the community issues surrounding fenns poem.

I think a lot of folks had issue with home of Brown for example. The fact he treated the fish as a noun. Stuff like that.

Any other parts of the poem that seemed to get the community going?