Possible Location: Acadia Mountain?

[wgardner]

All of MDI is covered by 44° N (also shown on map on page 30).
All of MDI is covered by 68° W (also shown on map on page 30).
DMS (degree, min, sec) is shown on the camera on page 19, alongside 1927614.

Interestingly, Lat 44° 19m 27.614s N is on the island and goes right through Norumbega Mountain at the center and the unlabeled POI by Jordan pond.

But perhaps even more interestingly, Long 68°, 19m 27.614s W is also on the island, cutting through just to the west of Somes Sound.

44° 19' 27.614'' N, 68° 19' 27.614'' W  is near the summit of Acadia Mountain (!), about 100 feet north of a trail leading up to the Acadia Mountain peak.

Has anybody ever checked this location??


131491 license plate decodes to ACADIA. Of course the whole park is Acadia park, but maybe this clue was intended to be a more specific confirmation for Acadia Mountain?

[pumalion]

This is some great sleuthing.

My initial thinking is that the location is not going to be hidden in plain sight like that, with a specific, pinpointed site that can be found without solving the master riddle (whatever form that riddle might take).

Even if recognizing and joining these four numbers hidden in three illustrations "is" the master riddle, the general understanding is that nothing can be hidden in a national park and that the authors have obeyed all laws in the hiding of the key.

Lastly, this solution does require some specialized knowledge of longitude and latitude. It's hard to know where to draw the line, but I believe Pel said in his interview that everything needed to solve the puzzles is in the book. Maybe that means that you have to be able to know how to plot coordinates using navigation techniques, but it strikes me as a little too far outside of the book to be a likely solution.

If you find the key there, however, I will stand corrected.

[wgardner]

Thanks for the thoughts, pumalion.

I personally think there will be some combination of a real, text Master Riddle ala Masquerade that can be decoded somehow, combined with or related to a DMS-based location. I'm still hopeful that the NUMBERS OPEN HIDDEN TREASURE RIDDLE star clue is meaningful.

The 44N and 68W Lat and Long are specifically shown on the map on page 30 and the DMS clue on the camera seem a bit too specific to be 100% red herrings to me. Lats and Longs with the specified accuracy (3 decimal digits) are accurate to within 100 feet. I'm still curious why the 44 degrees is shown in red while the 68 degrees is shown in yellow, especially given the red/yellow compass roses all over and the "RED, YELLOW, BOOK" spelled out on the signs on the Cadillac Mountain page. And the fact that both Norumbega Mountain and the unlabeled POI fall exactly on 44° 19' 27.614" N seems like too much of a coincidence.  [BTW, to also reiterate, the unlabeled POI also seems to fall right about at 68° 14' 29.828" W, with the minutes and seconds matching the 014029828 ISBN from the orange book.]

But I'm at a loss as to how to guess/find the Master Riddle at this point (as I'm sure most sleuthers who have come before me are). There are so many rabbit holes that one can go down into. The irregularly colored borders on the camera, lobsterman, and eagle pages seem like the most promising possibilities, or something to do with the text/ chapter titles. Yet just trying 10s-to-100s of random decoding methods seems kind of pointless. I hope we are all just missing something...