2018-06-28 47 -122

Location

Just off the Hollyhillis Powerline Trail in West Woodinville - or is it?

Participants

Thomcat

Plans

Solve the mystery on the way to work.

Expedition

Zoomed in on the local coordinates and found it to be right off a trail. Looks good, but powerline trails can go over ponds and scrub bushes. When I switched to the Aerial view, the red flag moved to the west!

The coordinates displayed in the search window also changed, from 47.772544842685306,-122.17227039872789 to 47°46'21.2"N 122°10'20.2"W. It looks like for some reason the west fraction changed from .172270 to .1744591, which is fairly significant.

Bing shows the flag, the aerial view and the bird's eye view at the proper spot. I have had problems with GPS under power wires (and expect to this morning), but is this an instant of Google running into the same thing? Is it related to the nearby street view? Time to solve a mystery!

Update

Arrived at the nearby street in this subdivision, which is basically a lot of manufactured homes (mobile homes?). Also lots of speed bumps, thank you no thank you.

Parking, I saw a fence, which matches the aerial google view - construction impinging on the power line right-of-way. I don't think I'd want to live under some high voltage power lines, especially considering the effect they have on my GPS.

After parking and snapping a picture, I walked a little and saw a gap at the edge of the fence - access after all! Now where would the spot end up, error and all? It turns out the geohashpoint was on this side of the fence, measured 3 ways, and behind the fence was somebody's yard from the next cul-de-sac over. I did walk up a bit and snap a picture from over the fence. Returning to Google now and turning off the "3D" view, the fence is now clearly visible, along with the (now correct) flag for the hashpoint.

Success noted, I headed off to work and promptly forgot about updating this until now. Seattle already had the record for the most expeditions in June of 2018 (with two!) and this will now take that total to a slightly more respectable 3.