A Map or a Puzzle? — The Appalachian Footpath Box
What Exactly Are We Solving?
As I sat down to write over this past weekend, I began writing something entirely different than this. I’ve put my other article on the back burner for the moment, partially to allow me to do more research, and partially because, as I was mowing the yard, I had this thought occur to me: Am I trying to solve a puzzle or am I trying to read a map? Or both? The answer to this question is important because it determines how I’ll proceed in this hunt. I guess, up until this point, I’ve been treating it as more of a map than a puzzle. I think it’s time I should consider both. So, I’m going to go over what I think a good approach would be in both of these scenarios.
Map
Treating the map as, well, a map is how I’ve been approaching this treasure hunt so far. I think this is the most intuitive way to begin working on this chapter, and probably how most people have tried to locate the treasure. You match the pictograms to physical locations, figure out where the dashed line matches, then go to the X and get the treasure. It sounds really easy. The problem is that the dashed line matches one specific location, and the pictograms could seemingly match anywhere, except, interestingly, at Little Rock Pond, where the trail matches the dashed line in the book. Regardless, I think using the map method makes Little Rock Pond hard to ignore as a physical location.
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If you are approaching this chapter as a map, you cannot disregard Little Rock Pond. The dashed line matches there, and there’s no getting around that. If you have a solve that explains the dashed line matching in Vermont, but leads you to a different location. Then I would argue that you are solving a puzzle and not reading a map, which is what I’d like to discuss next.
Puzzle
Treating this chapter as a puzzle has one very large advantage, or maybe disadvantage. It leaves a lot more flexibility in how the components of the map are used. For instance, if you are using the map method, the pictograms are fixed points. If you are instead looking at a puzzle, then the pictograms could be used for all kinds of things: maybe you take a certain letter from each word to decipher a message, or they all represent different states along the Appalachian Trail, or maybe some of them need to be combined to tell us something. Anytime you would use components of the map to solve or reveal something hidden, I would consider it a puzzle-like solve. When you look at the map through this lens, there are a lot of pieces to this puzzle, including the dashed line. This method gives a lot less weight to the dashed line and the match at Little Rock Pond, treating it as just another piece rather than the final piece. The triangle near the dashed line says “BEGIN HERE”, so there’s an argument to be made that maybe it’s not only just another piece, but only the very first piece.
Both a Map and a Puzzle
Viewing this chapter as both a map and a puzzle seems the most likely scenario to me. Part of the reason I think this is because we know there are three distinct ways to locate the treasure. There is plenty of room on the map to include a puzzle-like solve, a map-like solve, and a combination of the two. It would seem a bit insane if Jon Collins-Black drew this map for us, created three different ways to arrive at the treasure, and then none of those ways used a map-like solve to get there. So, I think two out of three of them have the possibility to be more puzzle-like. If I’m right about this, the hard part then becomes getting all of the unnecessary puzzle pieces off of my treasure map.
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For video content related to There’s Treasure Inside on YouTube, take a look at Erik’s channel over at One Clue Short of a Treasure
