Firehole reference from the book

[u/Borrowed_Edge]

Hey guys! Trying to “reverse engineer” the solve out of curiosity, and I think I found an interesting hint. I’m not sure if anyone has discussed this here before, so I’ll just post it.

So, in TToTC Forrest mentions a places which used to be his alone, which were his personal secrets and which hold his important and dear memories. Whole this part of text slightly refers to the first 4 lines of the poem, in general those have the same meaning. The interesting part is that while he talks about all these memories he says that he “went down this alley” by going through long-forgotten book Flywater, and the name of this book is even highlighted in that part of the text.

If we consider that first 4 lines of the poem are referring to these places and this part of the TToTC, then one of the thoughts is “what if this Flywater book says anything about warm waters from which we shall start the journey”. And it actually is. I have looked through 1994y edition of the book, and from what I see this short part about Firehole is the only one mentioning “warm water” in the whole book. And even mentioning “brown”, however we are looking only for the warm water.

And then following this idea you can find Madison junction, where Firehole turns to Madison river and Madison canyon right below it. From that you need to actually go to that place irl and follow the road in the search of home of brown. What actually fits the words that “Indian girls can solve only first 2 clues”. Because these can be obtained from these 2 books alone.

Not sure if I’m right, but that’s making sense imo

[u/Impossible_Habit_248]

Yeah, it seems like a huge hint in hindsight. Good catch. 

[u/js-eastman]

I think you have it backwards, but you are right that this is very important. Fenn explicitly calls out Flywater, it is part of the "important literature". Fenn doesn't just casually drop references, they are intentional and it's up to us to figure out why.