How many chapters in the book do YOU think are clue bearing? 4? 5? 7? 9? More? Less?

If I’m remembering correctly, I’ve heard Posey refer to the checkpoint as a checksum as well, and I’m wondering if the term is interchangeable to him or if they’re really two different things. (just seeking people‘s opinions)

So I guess my real question is, can we consider it as having found the checkpoint if we figured out the thing/method that lets you confirm beyond any doubt that your data point for a clue is 100% correct? So you may only have a portion of the puzzle solved and, but you know the exact process, the framework and you know how to confirm your outputs are accurate and lead to a specific location. Would that also be considered finding the checkpoint or do we consider the checksum a different thing?

Does cheese have anything to do with this hunt? Working hard on getting info together for my final BOTG in August. I think cheese might be a clue but I can’t put anything together on it. I thought maybe he liked the Cheesecake Factory but I can’t find the quote so maybe I’m misremembering.

I spent over 10k$ so far on this quest….

Looking for of 10-15k funding for 1 kilo gold bar if I will find …

Montana mostly in case you wonder

Happy Semiquincentennial! Not odd at all that JP makes no honorary post or rustle on this date given the significance of American history to his life and this hunt, not to mention the role of the Declaration of Independence (250th birthday) in his favourite cinematic reference National Treasure?

Maybe we have to wait until August 2nd?

Does anyone know or has JP confirmed how many actual physical locations the poem refers to?

Since the official start of BtME, July is here and will rapidly slip past just like June. Is anyone developing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder yet?

Although I myself don't subscribe to solves that involve constellations or using star charts, I did find the following connections interesting at the very least:

Kochab is the second-brightest star in Ursa Minor and, along with its neighbor Pherkad, has historically been referred to as the "Guardian of the Pole." And interestingly, Kochab itself was near the pole star position roughly 3,000 years ago due to Earth’s precession.

Kochab is listed as 42x larger than the Sun (by diameter) and is located roughly 126 light years from our solar system (depending on measurement used).

Again, I’m not saying I think the solve requires star charts or constellation mapping, but the 42 / 126 connection is still an interesting coincidence.

Uncanny resemblance

https://preview.redd.it/bkndd0y7thah1.png?width=1245&format=png&auto=webp&s=428db69205cc4fde61cd4363f59e56e359e0ca9b

https://preview.redd.it/76iy8juethah1.png?width=863&format=png&auto=webp&s=2c0a490fda598fe22265cc0e61102f3e0f3ed90d

The comma in the 6th line of the poem: "round the bend, past the hole" is curious.

It leads me to believe the meter of the poem provides important direction/clues.

If you write out the meter of the poem there are a few anomalies but in that second stanza it's particularly odd- he could have written "round the bend and past the hole" and it would have fit the meter of that stanza exactly. But he chose a comma.

Conventional look: it's an important clue and breaking it into two clauses is just the better way to convey the clue. And any variations in meter are just a means of writing a more coherent poem.

Code/pattern look 1: the punctuation is key: commas semicolons, dashes, periods: they are interpretable (prob can't constitue a cipher bc he said there's only 1)

Code/pattern look 2: the anomalies in the poem's meter are important: here are the words/syllables that break the pattern of the poem:

For (Comma) I -ty (or "T") Where (maybe) Be (maybe) -dy (or "D")

For most of the poem it's stressed-unstressed, but the entire 3rd stanza is unstressed-stressed as is the middle of the 4th stanza. So maybe the "where" and "be-" are not part of it

......Or he had the concept worked out already and put the poem together in a few hours, and deviated from the exact meter to make the poem work.

But that comma is fishy. 4 , I T D ?

https://x.com/uscommsnerd/status/2071948140299554913?s=20

Hi fellow hunters! I recently went BOTG and found an issue with a line in the poem “I wait for you to cast your pole,” mainly because my current solution for this line centers on a fishing spot. Based on everything I have read and gathered from the book, it seems obvious to me that I will be disappointed if it doesn’t include a fishing spot. Lines in the poem that let me know my current solutions are:
•“Those fishing waters taught me more about life than any textbook could —about waiting”
•The bait bonanza story with all its references to the fishing pole
•The mountain memory story was when he said, “I cast my line to a babbling brook”
• All the stories showing a passion for fishing

Do you all feel the same way, or do you have the same solution?
If you have another solution to this line, can you share why and provide any evidence?

The quoted portions of this post might be copyrighted. 

The unquoted portions are my own words, not generated by AI, and you may use them as you see fit, claim them as your own ideas, argue with them, or ignore them completely.

I just ask that you take what you can use, and leave the rest.

A Father

"Heaven forbid a bird should just be a bird in our backyard."

This is not incidental. This is not just a bird in my backyard. Listen to that northern cardinal.

--

"And without missing a beat he recited: “The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a poet indeed, who sings the beauty of the morning as much as the happiness of the bird.” 

Without interrupting the measured rhyme, my father imparted some true natural wisdom from a man who died long ago--yet whose writing and poetry about his communion with nature still endure.  The bird, the song, the forest, the hopeful dawn of a new day, and the memory and experience of the awe and hope that nature inspires--all things my father tried to teach me as I was yawning and thinking about Saturday plans with my friends instead. Now, all I have are the memories and the ache of regret, and I don't want to lose another Saturday to sleep. These things, unlike us, are immortal--alive and everlasting through time. 

--

That's not the exact quote, of course.

"Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told. Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, there is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him."

A bird, whose poetic song guards the gates to the cosmos.

"Heaven forbid."

In whose strain the story is told. An interesting phrase to omit.

From Latin, colare , "to filter, strain".

In French, couler, to flow--or coulee, for "flow", in the present tense.

A term for struggling, overcoming, injury from overuse.

A way to denote lineage.

A term for an intermittent body of flowing water--a "deep ravine, seasonally flooded,". The word is common on maps because of the exploration of French fur trappers.

It's where we get the word "colander", like for pasta, or a tool to steep loose leaf tea.

"Helicopters in these mountains were rare, but this one came equipped with a massive bucket swinging beneath it like a giant tea strainer dangling from the sky."

"A recent storm had thrown nature’s equivalent of a toddler’s tantrum, leaving the water coffee-colored."

Water, filtered through ground(s), to coffee. 

Childhood, a toddler, crying. Mother nature there for comfort, cradling, stemming the intermittent deluge of tears.

Father there, with his morning coffee, feeding the birds.

--

"I nodded sagely."

I nodded, trying to appear wise. But I was a child yet, and I did not know back then that one day, when my father was no longer here to rouse me too early, I would rue the loss of all these bright Saturday mornings, which I spent half-asleep, wishing I could just go back to bed. 

My pretended understanding grew into painful wisdom, in the shadow of hindsight. I spent my life half-asleep, both literally and figuratively. Now, my father would never awaken again, but I still could, and I would tell others one day about the reverence for miracles of nature that he had inspired, just like he told me about Emerson, and the bird, and their everlasting poetry. 

--

“You know,” he said, setting down his mug with the gravitas of Moses about to part the Red Sea, “I’ve been thinking about this area of the backyard. What if we extended the house to have a nice, big family room here, and added columns out there with an overhang? The French doors would open about here,” he continued, striding about the yard in his robe like a movie director blocking an epic scene, pointing out landmarks that existed only in his mind."

My father taught me how to use my imagination to envision a plan and how to execute it. I know now that just because my dreams and ideas might not make immediate sense to others, and may seem fanciful or impossible, they can come to fruition with tools, patience, loving care (passion), and knowledge. My map may be hard to understand, but it is useful--and requires some imagination to make sense. In hindsight, knowing my father, and seeing his vision come to life, I can understand what he was seeing as he marched around the yard pointing out his invisible landmarks. I just wasn't seeing what he was seeing, then. But he saw the full potential of our boring old back yard and imagined a version that was much grander and more beautiful than I could see at the time.

 

--

“These can’t be real,” they’d declare with the conviction of flat-earthers at a globe convention. To them, the idea that my father could cultivate a tropical paradise in the middle of our decidedly untropical Tucson backyard was about as plausible as finding out your goldfish had learned to tap dance. Only after touching the supple leaves would they be forced to believe."

My father used wisps of love and tenderness and consistency as ingredients for a magic spell that brought the desert back to blossoming, beautiful life. I learned that once I follow through on my plans with the same dedication, the impossible shrinks down to simply the challenging. Others will see that dreams can become reality, even when they didn't believe it before. Children do not let reality stand in the way of wanting to be dinosaurs when they grow up. They do not even consider that it may be impossible. The disparity between unfettered imagination and the harsh light of knowledge is of little consequence to a baby dinosaur who is still just...an egg. 

He doesn't know that there will come a day when the world will quickly and harshly start telling him it's not right for him to be a dinosaur and he needs to start living in reality, and what strife that may eventually cause him down the line. He is lucky to be naive. He hasn't eaten the fruit from the tree yet. He doesn't realize he's naked. He doesn't have any shame. 

"Each morning he wasn’t commandeering trains, Dad performed his ritual of feeding the birds, a tradition I’ve continued at my own home. With a steaming mug of coffee in one hand and birdseed in the other, he welcomed the morning chorus as the world came alive."

And so to carry on his memory, I perform this ritual which my father passed down to me. I feed breadcrumbs to the hungry birds who come flocking to me, and I talk to them while they eat, maybe in hopes that I might impart what knowledge I have gained from my experience, and my father's before me, and his teachers' before me. Once I found out what was important to me, I decided not to waste any more time. I want to share and inspire in others the hope that can come with each passing day, the wonder that comes from flexing your imagination unabashedly, and the grace to be allowed to set down the heavy things that the world says we have to carry now and then and just play, like we used to, before time turned our blurry lack of foresight into 20/20 hindsight.

Nowadays, have my own coffee cup, of course--but on occasion, you might see two, and that's how you know he is here in spirit. 

***

"Every fisherman carries a mental map marked with sacred waters—places where the mundane world dissolves at the riverbank, leaving only the eternal triangle of river, fish, and friendship. These spots become temples, their locations passed between trusted souls in whispers, if shared at all. To speak them aloud feels like breaking a spell, risking the dissipation of their particular magic. The connection runs soul-deep, binding not just friend to friend but human heart to wild places. Nine Mile Hole held this power over us, this marriage of water and memory where two boys became brothers, where we learned the language of current and call of river."

My Brother Brandon and I, both products of the marriage of a father and a mother, of water and memory, of hopes and dreams. The bond between the love song of the human heart and wild places. Poem and map.

The mundane world, from mundanus , "belonging to the world". Mundus, "clean, elegant". The mundane era, 4004 B.C.E. Kosmos, the Greek version, referring to the orderly arrangement of the universe. 

An organized fridge. Steps in consecutive order. A route to follow. Filtering out the noise. Making sense of the chaos. 

A soul bond that outlasts time and death, an everlasting and endless binding of two personalities who emerged from the primordial soup and somehow, their atoms combined in just the right configuration, and against astronomically low odds, those souls found one another and shared part of a brief blink of the universe's indifferent eyes. 

That's all I will say for now. 

***

His Bride

"Speaking of hide-and-seek: there was what we called The Great Gift Hunt. As birthdays and Christmases approached, Brandon and I would seek out the location of our gifts prematurely—though my brother, ever the honorable one, would stop short of actually peeking once we found them. I had no such restraint. And my mother would come up with new hidden spots, turning holidays into a high-stakes game of cat and mouse. One year she decided the safest place for the stash was a tiny, locked compartment on our horse trailer. Mother clearly didn’t know who she was dealing with. Within hours I had picked the lock and glimpsed my treasure trove of surprises."

My mother trained and taught me with increasingly complex puzzles and challenges. Christmases and birthdays were the big ones, the highest stakes, but other family members had their own games here and there as well--all opportunities for me to keep honing my skills. 

--

"My greatest ally in these tactical operations was a quarter horse named Meghan. While my brothers relied on mundane hiding spots like closets or under beds, I developed a technique I called “hiding in plain sight while dangling precariously from a horse’s neck.” I’d hang off Meghan’s side like a circus performer, sliding left to right as seekers passed by, never knowing the best hiding spot swayed before them, alongside a living, breathing lookout tower."

They were looking right past her, nay, everywhere except at her, the hoarse, and I was along for the ride, performing dramatic feats--much like a magician, whose tactics of distraction and pageantry serve to hide what the assistant is up to in the background. A valuable lesson from my youth. 

--

"I remember one particular birthday when Mother orchestrated a treasure hunt that transformed our house into an explorer’s paradise. A dozen parchment clues led my friends and me through a labyrinth of discovery. The final prize emerged like a long-lost artifact: a blue cardboard chest."

I liked the idea of Forrest's poem being married to his map. My mother gave us the parchment clues, her own type of poetry to marry to my father's backyard treasure map, where his imaginary landmarks were obvious in his mind, but I struggled to make sense of his vision. 

A blue chest, now lost to time after figuring out the answers and the truth about what's really inside. A cardboard chest--something flimsy and temporary, but which held something much greater than what seemed valuable at the time--childhood trinkets and tat, a prize, a pot of fake gold that would almost immediately lose its allure once acquired. So what was inside? I can't remember, because ultimately, it doesn't matter. That's not the point of the story. What does a dog do with the car he's been chasing once he finally catches it? 

The point is that my mother gave me the blueprints I would one day use to share that magical gift of experience that she gave me with others--as many as I could possibly reach.  

--

"One year she decided the safest place for the stash was a tiny, locked compartment on our horse trailer. Mother clearly didn't know who she was dealing with. Within hours I had picked the lock and glimpsed my treasure trove of surprises."

My equine-assisted game of hide-and seek is inspired by my mother and The Great Gift Hunt, and sometimes, when I can see a lock, it reminds me that her gifts are always with me, even if I can't see them, and I am doing my best to carry them forward. 

--

"None of it mattered. We were all searching for something we couldn’t name. That’s why we played hide and seek too long. Why every gift became a mystery."

My mother showed her love through fostering our skills and interests. We learned through games, and she gave us what seemed like simple amusements at the time. We didn't know then that her challenges were helping us discover and learn new skills. That she was providing a safe outlet for our curiosity and an escape from the few harsh realities of life that we'd had to face at a young age. That she was fostering creativity, curiosity, a desire to identify patterns and solve problems--skills I would carry into adulthood, and one day, pass on to others in much the same way, once I was ready. 

If the mystery is solved, people stop seeking answers. If the game ends, people stop playing. Without that 10 x 10 x 5 box out there, what do you have?

Thanks for your time.

Has anyone been to the Coordinates he shows on the combination lock?
If not coordinates what else could it be?
42 still seems to be a mystery and the computer screens on the Netflix show still no answers.

Remember he said “it’s not near a man made trail, he didn’t want a hiker randomly running into it” it’s a mile off a path near a popular bend him and Tucker have many memories in.
Botg starting bakers hole on the 10th.

Thought I would share some of my unsuccessful recent solves for others that might find it useful.

I want to shine light on the fact that ive seen tons of comments and positive talk on post that are obviously not good solves pr questions ect ect, example " we went yo glacier park for our solve" and people saying awsome congratulations ect... and its like.. last thing you should do is go into a national park, Hawaii, or Alaska for 1

But its like people want to encourage people that obviously need some insight, and not comments or engage in any one who's actually has some good info... so I feel like this community for the most part and im not saying all is a bunch of people who getad if someone is onto something and encourage people that dont know shii, and could use real feed back.. with that being said im going into troll mode and ill be pointing out every te I see an example of this.. sharing and blasting people's obvious fake bs.🫡 happy hunting "community "