Here are the new clues:
Lake is 110 acres.
There are animal pens, oil wells, hay fields, savannah-type meadows.
If one attempted to swim across the lake from the campsite, one would encounter a "thicket" of trees. There was some debate about how far this was. Mike thought it was nowhere near a mile -- Corby thought it was further.
There are the new clues.
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| Pass the beans, please. |
I'm still intrigued by two of the earlier clues: the 7:32 sunrise, and a nearby town with a bar beginning with the word "Mule."
So I'm still scouting the Mingus metro
If you check the map, go north about two miles and a little to the east, and you will find Lake CB Long.
There is a privately-owned CB Long Ranch in Palo Pinto county.
There are also oil wells in Palo Pinto county.
Turning to Google Earth, we find open fields adjoining the lake -- savannah-like, to my eye.
If you zoom in on the lake and scout the area near the shore, just south and west of the easternmost bulge of the lake you will see a single boxy structure. Cabin-like, to my eye. I believe that the straight part of the shore at that point is the C.B. Long Dam. There is a road crossing the northern lobe of the lake, but I don't thnk it's a dam.
Google Earth does not have a scale on it that I can find, but Google Maps does. A square mile is 640 acres, so a 110-acre lake is about .17 square miles. A square mile is 5280 feet squared, or about 4.7 million square feet. .17 times 4.7 million = 806,000 square feet, or about 900 feet on a side.
Regrettably, Lake CB Long is not square, so forget all of those calculations. However, if on Google Maps you place the lake next to the scale (sized to show a linear mile) and try to imagine whether you could get 5 Lake CB Longs -- scrunched into an appropriate shape -- into a square mile, it's imagineable. Especilly if the part of the lake north of the road crossing it (which looks rather murky -- the lobe, not the road) is excluded.
Returning to Google Earth: If you imagine the campsite somewhere near the eastern edge of the lake (remembering the location of the possible cabin) and look directly across, you will see a peninsula that has on it some trees -- to my eye, a thicket. (A thicket on the Ticket, if you will.) It is nowhere near a mile -- maybe between a third- and a half-mile.
I cannot find much information about the C.B. Long Ranch, except in this memorial article about a ranch foreman who passed away in 2008: http://www.texashuntfish.com/app/journals/19716/The-Passing-of-a-Great-American-Cowboy. (Steve Holub, sounded like a wonderful guy -- foreman there for 50 years.) If you read it, you will see that one of the chief products of the ranch is -- hay.
So there's my new guess: The southeast quadrant of Lake CB Long.
Having been wrong the first time (but close, I still think), I won't scoreboard myself this time around. Mike V would have nothing to do with a loser like me.
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One more thing: This is of little probative value, and highly circumstantial, but: After I emailed Junior this morning about my Lake Mingus guess, I heard no further discussion of P1's guessing. If I was pretty close with Lake Mingus, one would not expect to hear that anyone had guessed correctly (or, in this case, close to correctly) even if the host didn't name the actual location, because after a bit a hundred souls or so might have checked in to Your Humble Site and seen the guess. (And within an hour or so I'd thrown Lake CB Long out there as well, in the comments.) Pretty flimsy, I know, but it crossed my mind.
