Million Dollar Question Answered (In-Part)
^(EDIT #3:) ^(People want the condensed version, of course. I have completely replaced it below with the lazy version. Some really enjoyed the full version. Some didn't. Sorry!)
^(EDIT #2:) ^(The two photos keep disappearing from the post, so I have posted them as one singular photo comment in this post comments below.)
^(EDIT #1:) ^(This is) ^(the 2nd time I have made this post. The first post was published at roughly 11:00pm CT 08AUG2026. Unfortunately, while correcting a typo I discovered in my Reddit app, the photos contained herein simply disappeared with no ability to re-add them. I deleted the original post due to such. I had people reach out asking to repost, and I agreed. Give yourself ample time to read this or save it for later if you must. Thanks for all of the kind words on the original post late last night. Best of luck to everyone on their hunts!)
I’ve been sitting on quite a bit for a long time now. Some of it came through research, some through methods I’m not ready to explain, and a couple of the more important pieces were things I literally walked straight up to because that is where my solve told me to go. I’m sharing some of it now because the hunt feels like it is entering a different phase. I’m not trying to convince anyone that I’m right, and I’m definitely not giving everything away, but if our positions were reversed, I’d want to know that someone out there was finding things that seemed to go well beyond simply interpreting words on a page. One of those things involves Grandpa Fitzwater.
The runaway-tire story in Beyond the Map’s Edge always bothered me. Grandpa supposedly chases a trailer wheel into the water, gets knocked unconscious, and somehow ends up floating downstream on top of it. Maybe that happened exactly as written, maybe it didn’t, but what eventually mattered to me was realizing the story could also be describing something visually. A tire lying flat has parallel bands running across it, and a natural boulder can have the same appearance through weathering, mineral bands, or old water lines. Grandpa lying across the top could then be represented by some kind of marking, shape, or etching on the surface. Through a separate method, I was led to a particular seasonal water feature and essentially told where to look from there. When I finally went BOTG, I found a boulder with horizontal parallel lines running across it, and on top was an unusual multi-line marking that looked like an X or star with a tail.
That got my attention immediately. The direction of those tail lines also matched an orientation I had already derived independently from the compass imagery on the book cover. Suddenly the floating tire story, the rock imagery, the North Star idea, and this physical boulder were all sitting on top of one another. That became Grandpa Fitzwater for me. The problem was that I misunderstood what I had actually found.
For roughly seven months, I treated that location like the checkpoint and pushed forward into Stanza 3 from there. That mistake cost me a ridiculous amount of time, several BOTG trips, rental-car miles, research hours, and probably a measurable percentage of my sanity. The frustrating part was that I kept finding things I still believe are legitimate. They just belonged later. That created one of the nastiest kinds of false confirmation possible: the evidence itself could be relevant while I was using it in the wrong order. Instead of forcing me to abandon the larger structure, those discoveries kept reinforcing a sequence I had misunderstood.
Seekers Summit finally forced me to reconsider almost everything, or at least prove it all. One answer in particular hit me hard: if you are confident in the location where you are searching, there is little reason to stray, but it really comes down to how you built that confidence. That sent me backward. I started questioning things I had treated as settled, recognizing hints I had missed, and eventually realizing I had probably overcomplicated Stanza 3 for months. Somewhere in that reset, I came to the larger compass idea I had already been working upon unknowingly. Four characters in Justin’s life appeared to correspond with four physical elements of a compass, and I had already identified candidates for all four locations. Then the obvious finally hit me: four outside points do not really confirm a compass. You don't navigate from the top of the compass (the north point, which is what I was doing all along and failing). The center pivot point confirms it.
That was when the word pivotal started sounding a lot less figurative. If those four outside elements really formed a compass, then somewhere between them should be the pivot—the center pin where the entire thing comes together. I spent months trying to figure out where that point should be. When I finally returned in July, I tested two candidates and struck out on both. That evening, back at the hotel, I realized I had overlooked something embarrassingly simple in the poem: her foot of three. That changed the geometry, produced a third candidate, and gave me a new waypoint to test the following morning.
This time, I was not wandering around hoping to find something interesting and then drawing a target around it afterward. The pin existed before I ever got there. I walked toward it with my phone out, making only the adjustments necessary to avoid trees and terrain, until my position marker essentially overlapped the waypoint. I stopped, waited for the GPS to settle, and looked down. There it was: an arrow-shaped rock. Plain as day. I had approached it from the side, and part of it was covered with pine needles and mud, but the shape was obvious enough that I knew immediately what I was looking at.
The important part was not simply that an arrow-shaped rock existed somewhere near my predicted center. It was sitting essentially at the point I had plotted. Then I looked at where it pointed. Back toward Grandpa Fitzwater, along the same general axis I had already been working with. Behind the arrow, in the opposite direction, was the foot of three, while the other two compass elements also crossed through essentially the same center. That was the moment the “compass of lost loved ones” stopped being four interesting locations and became, for me, a functioning navigational system.
It also changed the way I read Stanza 3. My interpretation now is that the compass is intentionally out of alignment and that “return her face” is a mechanical instruction. The fixed pointer establishes the reference, while the surrounding compass face or rose must be corrected by twenty degrees. Reset the face, and a new bearing is created from the pivot. Suddenly another clue I had thought about almost from the beginning—“the key to one direction lies in another”—started sounding much more literal. I had always expected some kind of redirect from a precise physical location; I simply had the wrong location for most of the hunt.
Once I made that correction, the new bearing pointed toward an area where I had already spent time during earlier failed searches. The difference was that before, I only had a general area. Now I had a line. As I currently understand the sequence, I first had to find the compass, then find its center, confirm the geometry, recognize that the orientation was wrong, return the face twenty degrees, and cast the corrected bearing toward “the place.” Whether the arrow itself is technically the checkpoint, whether “the place” is the checkpoint, or whether that label belongs somewhere else is something I am not pretending to know yet. What matters to me is that the sequence finally makes sense.
The morning after finding the arrow rock, I followed that corrected line without having done enough desk work to isolate one specific endpoint. It was mostly reconnaissance, and there was one section of that line I deliberately chose not to investigate. After returning home, I spent the next several weeks working the line with the same two secret methods I had been using for months. Naturally, almost everything pushed me straight back toward the small section I skipped. Of course it did.
And not just generally. I am now looking at a very small area, roughly 10 meters by 10 meters and possibly smaller, where that corrected line intersects a feature that would be extremely fitting for “the place.” That is where I am now. I am not claiming the treasure is there until I stand there and prove it. It could even be the checkpoint. I don't know. For what I can tell, based on my solve, this area IS the place described in the poem. I have eaten enough humble pie during this hunt to know better than to claim this is IT. But I also know there is a huge difference between wandering around until something interesting appears and predicting where something should exist before ever seeing it. I have now experienced the latter more than enough.
So, soon enough, I’ll be back following Justin's words, going BOTG with the fourth Stanza because these two solving methods from the armchair are not valid anymore. I didn't have to go BOTG until now, technically, but the "brute-force" method was the route I unknowingly chose. You know, if I could go back, I don't think I'd do anything different in that sense. It's been one hell of a ride.
And we’ll see what is actually there.
Arrow-shaped rock, point the way!
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