Aces Full of Links

Lost in Dartmouth

Last week, on Thursday, I made the mistake of agreeing to wander around in the woods with Ryan and Sara like some latter-day Lewis, Clark and Sacagawea. We didn’t actually get lost (we knew exactly where we were, thanks to our directional senses… and GPSrs) but we couldn’t get from point A to point B.

Their plan was to find the passage between Stephen’s new house (near Tucker road in Dartmouth) and our offices. My mistake was joining them.

As the crow flies, it’s under a mile. Our boss, Jim, claimed he was able to make the trip through the woods in 6 minutes. We got this information second hand, through Stephen. Let em tell you, I am extremely skeptical. However, at the time we believed he (at the very least) made the trip. And, if he did make the trip, he is an extremely quick fellow.

I’ve never told the blog about Jim before, but let me give you all you need to know at this point. The man is a runner, and a very fit one at that. He’s probably the most fit person I know in my parents’ age group. Last year, on a Thanksgiving day run he caught his leg on the remains of an old metal sign. This sent him sprawling and he fell and broke his kneecap. I got to see the X-rays; it was definitely broken.

He ran back home, about 4 miles with the broken kneecap.

So, you see, when we’re told that Jim made it through the woods from point A to point B in 6 minutes, covering a distance of just under a mile, we’re skeptical but not too skeptical. After seeing the man do pull-ups by his fingertips on a door frame, you stretch your imagination.

So, we parked to the east and set out for the west. How bad could it be? I estimated that if Jim could do it in 6 minutes, we could do it in 30. On the outside.

We left on a 30 minute tour that stretched out near 2 hours. We never made it across. We encountered marsh and swamp, thorns and mud, a river we couldn’t cross and a pretty pond. But mainly we wandered around in the woods, with purpose but no luck. By the time we were done we were smelly, sweaty, swampy, and cranky.

The day began with my computer covered in toilet paper. It ended with the three of us exhausted, wandering in the thorns. At the moment, the quest to find a possible passage west-southwest seems to me like the story of the Oak Island Money Pit I read as a child.

Instead of writing out a chronicle in detail here, I superimposed the GPS track on a satellite picture. Click the image to the left and it will take you to an annotated map of our journey. I thought that would be more fun. ‘Tis especially fun to note is how we slowed down as the terrain got much worse. In the Flickr annotations, I’ve added timestamps. Can you tell where we were zipping along and where we were stuck in the briar patch? Probably.

One additional link, Yahoo Maps actually shows the Paskamansett River, unlike Google maps. You can see that as we traveled south, we had to come further east and things just got worse. You win some, you lose some.