Nominal vs Functional

artifact

Consolation climb

33 minutes late or right on time?

Title IX

I can't remember when I first noticed The Structure. Probably after early exploration of some of the old paths down from the elementary school. There are surprisingly frequent tracks on the southeastern fork of the disused trail, someone else willing to contort themselves through blowdowns and thorns, but to what end? They always stop in the same spot - the little rise of land with marshy stream confronting you in every direction but back. If you extended the path out in a straight line you would hit it dead on, a mysterious gray polygon with no clear access. I decide the mystery ends today.

I choose the left bank of the marsh. Find a decent spot to hop the stream and start fighting my way through some pretty nasty bushwhacking. I attempt to follow squirrel tracks, but they pay no mind to the thick branches above that slow my progress. Seems like every little hill gives way to yet another stream. How does such a small marsh have so many tributaries? I stop to check the map and realize not only have I overshot, I may have picked the wrong side of the water. It's a gamble to cross the swamp without knowing what's underneath, but it can't be more than a foot or two deep and at 30F it's a risk I'm willing to take. I'm not going home without knowing. Once again I try my best to follow the squirrel tracks, hoping that they have some secret ability I lack to judge what lies beneath the snow. Think light thoughts. Hit the other bank more or less dry.

I check the map again and I should be damn near on top of it, but I see nothing. I wade back towards the swamp, trying to let go of any expectation in my scanning, hoping to see something I didn't before. Two boards nailed to a dead tree. Certainly not enough for any real structure, maybe a small deer stand or bird watching blind, but not any time in the last 2 decades from the looks of it. Confident I've seen everything that can be seen until the spring thaw I shwack my way out and spend the rest of my miles pondering what might have been there or how it ended up marked on the map.

Search turns digital when I get home. First clue is that it's not present on openstreetmap, or the archive tool I find with some googling. Points to it being unlikely that it's a manual add. Next step Google Earth Pro. It's free, and if you're a local map nerd like me then you should be careful because it is a very very deep rabbit hole. I could spend hours looking at the historical GPS imagery. Turns out the adjacent neighborhood was just being developed in 2004, streets not paved yet. Some of my now secret running trails were sandy scars in the forrest for construction vehicle access. The field of solar panels at Saxon went in sometime between 2015 and 2018. There's nothing present in my swamp of interest for any of the snapshots going all the way back to 1999, but the topography remains remarkably consistent for an area that sees so much erosion that I can count multiple trail reroutes since just last season. 

Consulting with chatGPT it seems overwhelmingly likely that the hard borders of the swamp confused the auto structure identification algorithm of Mapbox, the intermediary between openstreetmap and strava. Lo and behold I go to their free demo version and it's the only other map that has this thing on it. Maybe it's an anticlimax, but to me it feels satisfactory. It's the story for today and it's not about work, to-do list tasks, sickness or death. 

That said, maybe I'll go back in the spring and add something to enhance the adventure for anyone who might travel this way in the future.

Top Sports

Sam Wallis

artifact

5 Photos

1 Comment

Splits

Sign up to view more activities from Sam Wallis

Nominal vs Functional

artifact

Consolation climb

33 minutes late or right on time?

Title IX

Want to see more?

The #1 app for runners and cyclists

Sign Up for Free. Track your progress and reach goals. Join 100 million active people on Strava.

See More from Sam