2010-05-05 45 -122

Wed 5 May 2010 in 45,-122: 45.4729926, -122.5194728 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

Location

Kingsley D. Bundy City Park in Southeast Portland.

Participants

• Michael5000
• Sarah

Plans

• Michael5000: This is only a few miles from work. The park may not be improved or very accessible, but I've got my GPS and took the precaution of wearing boots to work. This will be a lunchtime Expedition and an attempt to break my Wednesday curse.

Expedition

I was joined by Sarah, who determined that she would probably be able to try a little bushwhacking despite a foot recovering from recent injury. For our first approach to the Hashpoint, we followed 140th Avenue to the point where, on the map, it bends and turns into SE Claybourne Street. In real life, 140th dead-ends.

What happened to Claybourne Street? On the Google Maps satellite view, Claybourne is shown going right through the middle of a house. Perhaps it is a ghost street, placed on Google Maps to trap people who try to copy its database. Or, maybe it is a street from days gone by; there does seem to be a change in vegetation along the line of the mysterious missing street. In any event, we felt its absence very keenly, as it would have let us within a few hundred feet of the hashpoint.

We next tried an alternative approach, but again ran into a dead end that offered no access onto public land. As we got turned back around, an unsmiling woman came out to see what we were about. I asked about Kingsley Bundy Park and she grudgingly admitted that yes, there was a place of that name, but it's "not a park for people" and that we couldn't go there because animals are having their babies this time of year. I suggested, in so many words, that the very concept of "park" designated a categorization of place in human terms, "for people" as it were, but this was not a productive contribution to the conversation. I then asked her if there might be a public access point, which she answered with a glowering "yes, but it's a few streets over." I thanked her and drove on.

Call me cynical, but I suspected that this freelance defender of the public land that happens to abut her backyard might have fibbed to us. So instead of looking "a few streets over," I tried the very next street over, where we found an access point. By this time, unfortunately, we were short on time and would need to trace a route of close to a half mile to get around the crabby woman's land and reach the hashpoint. One final attempt to find a more efficient approach found us discovering a path through some trees into a clearing... that turned out to be somebody's backyard. We cheerfully declared the Expedition thwarted and returned to our labors.

Achievements!

• Sarah is my fourth Drag-Along victim.

• The Ambassador Achievement is defined as "Obtaining permission from a property owner... to access what would otherwise be a No Trespassing Geohash." On this trip, the exact opposite happened: we were forbidden by someone with no authority to access public land. I therefore feel that Sarah and I have won The Anti-Ambassador Achievement! I will, however, not create a banner for the Anti-Ambassador Achievement, for fear it might come in contact with a banner for the Ambassador Achievement and create a disastrous disruption to the space-time continuum.