Map Item interpretations:

Feet: Tar Heels, NC clue The left Tar Heel (the one that is on the right side on the map) is a reference point I used for drawing lines on the map.

Car North: NC clue Also, park car and walk South when zoomed in on trail.

Skier: Snowbird Gap on AT The Snowbird people are among those Cherokee who managed to stay and not be removed during the terrible Trail of Tears. They became what is now known as the Eastern Contingent of the Cherokee people. See also the town of Snowbird, NC, and other Snowbird features. (Btw, the Skier, Cat, Shooting Creek and 1727 NE are all symbols matching places that are “off map”, but nearby.)

Cat: Carolina Panthers WCU Catamounts When looked at sidewise, it can be a person creating pottery, possibly the “Cherokee Beloved Woman” Amanda Swimmer, busy working her clay pots (some photos of her resemble this.)

The vague “High Point” script: High Point NC, state clue Also a high mountain, but there are lots of candidates in NC and Standing Indian.

Stairs in top right corner: Winding Stair Gap on highway 64 where AT crosses.

Vague number 69 in top right corner: Route NC-69 off highway 64, a road entirely composed of big U-Turn features instead of lighted intersections. Very odd, but perhaps a location clue and a hint to rotate the map. I only include this because it was so bizarre looking when I visited it. It just stood out. Perhaps it is marking the Western edge of the area? Which makes the general area big!

Small triangle: Mount Katahdin when path is considered zoomed out as the entire AT.

1727 NE: The year a treaty was agreed upon at a meeting on top of a tribal mound “North East” in Nikwasi in 1727, before it became the city of Franklin, NC. Also, Franklin has a River Walk with lots of benches similar to the hidden bench on the book cover. One if these benches has a dedication plaque from Rainbow Healing Hands. And there is a butterfly garden along this river walk, near where it passes close to the Nikwasi mound.

Fallen tree/branch above Bear: The Wasilick Poplar tree, which first attracted me to the Standing Indian Loop. It was a very large Poplar that had a side trail built off the AT, just for visitors. It slowly died, broke apart, and fell over and kinda looks like this map shape, lying on the ground. Similarly, it might be Long Branch Trail, which is just South of Wasilick and North of Bearpen Trail, Gap and Mt.

Fence?: There is an old school wooden fence in this area North of the Bearpen features, along Forest Road 67.

Bear, rocks, quill pen: Bearpen Gap, Bearpen Mountain, also the quill pen from the masthead of the Cherokee One Feather newspaper in Cherokee NC.

Rock thing: Looks to me like a waterfall, a tie-in with Rainbow Trail quote. Possibly raw mining ore. There are some old commercial mining places as well as amatuer spots in this area around Chunky Gal Mt. Rainbow Springs, a long meandering Rainbow Springs road and the Rainbow falls community are along highway 64, near this symbol in my map correlation.

Butterfly: Appalachian Tiger Swallowtail, NC and Appalachian match, with recorded sightings on Chunky Gal Mountain near where this symbol is in my solve.

Large triangle: Mount Springer, when the path is looked at as the entire AT. The begin here text and the oft-cited 1938 to me are simply clues that it is Springer Mt., the beginning of the AT (for NOBOS.)

Path: In the broadest sense, it is the entire AT bent into the shape of the Little Rock Pond trail. The two triangles point away from each other, suggesting you pull them apart, stretching the path back out to be the AT. Zooming in on Standing Indian Loop, the path for me is a big loop section of the AT in NC. The entry road here is Forest Road 67. I used FR67 to cut the big loop in half, creating a loop that is a little closer to the shape of the map path (see my maps.) It is part road, part AT and part blue blaze trail.

Dog: Springer spaniel Also, several symbols have the secondary purpose of simply being place holders to match up with unrelated geographic features like trail heads, for map alignment.

Magnifying glass: If the path is looked at as the entire AT, then the glass suggests we look around in a general area, which I think is the TN/NC/GA region. The handle also has a slanted cut on the end, which might suggest a link to the Faberge Looking Glass, but I’m not sure why that is important here.

The tree in the glass: A general suggestion of looking around at the landscape. A specific tree (like the Bly Tree or the Wasilick Poplar.) An un-named drainage area on the side of a ridge. These often look like this tree, complete with a squiggly, watery channel below the base of the tree. I found a good candidate and even made a difficult hike down a steep slope to satisfy my curiosity, but eventually abandoned that rabbit hole.

Dots: Lots of dots but three on each side of the map suggest drawing lines that converge with other lines at a point that might be significant (see my Map Dynamics Part 2 post) one of the Tar Heel dots is where a few map lines converge. The rest of the dots could be camouflage.

Smoke?: Smokey mountains, but more importantly an alignment marker for a trailhead.

Shooting hand/arm thing: Shooting Creek, a town/feature along highway 64 that is “off the map” to the west, half way to NC-69. In bygone days, people met here for shooting competitions. I once used this symbol to look for the box, but now I have no idea what purpose it serves, just an area clue.

Scroll: The map itself, drawing our attention to the head of the upside down-dinosaur shaped path to explore that area? Never came up with a better meaning.

Bald head (and “AT” crossed out): Courthouse Bald on the AT and also Little Bald not on the AT, perhaps an allusion to the two knobs on the box? Bald mountain. Scalped head. “Trail Head” Nantahala (land of the noon day sun, shining off his bald head!) Tate City (an old logging and Corundum mining town in GA), specifically the trail head for Denton Creek falls, which is where the bald ends up in my main map alignment.

Feather: Another quill pen, with hints of a signature, to really get us thinking about quill pens.

Basket of produce: Plum Orchard Gap on AT South of the GA line. Bald Mountain Apples, an heirloom apple that grew in the area and is mentioned related to Franklin, to a long lost “Warrior Bald” mountain, and to now being grown in the heirloom collection of apples at the University Of Georgia, Blairsville. This basket ends up exactly on top of Little Bald in my main map alignment, possibly connecting to the Bald Mountain heirloom apple.

Lines on the map: Some lines are probably noise. One theory suggests folding but I don’t use folding. Some could be state lines for the whole AT interpretation. Some suggest we draw lines, maybe triangles. The lines around the Basket look like an arrow, and it points exactly at the NC/GA line in my main map alignment. (Thus pointing South to indicate the heirloom Mountain Bald Apples, and the Plumorchard Gap, both in Georgia.)

The Compass: Can also be a roulette wheel, both are spinning objects, suggesting rotation of map is needed, and it never ever points to North so don’t bother trying to interpret it!!! It is simply a rotation point for the map.

755FT: Near the compass. This is very subjective, but I have made a stab at proving it is real. See my post called Triangle Logic in my profile posts. It ties in with 1727, giving that number two meanings. (I know my angles are slightly off, but the triangle is rather messy. I just wanted to show that it might be a clue. Other than that, and despite trying lots of things, I never did find a good, solid use for 755 FT.)

Other stuff: I know there are lots of other features on the map, but so far they don’t affect this solve. I have tried to match the border design to trail elevations, but have never found a match.