Walt Disney World · six trails · 42 finds

Disney World Treasure Trails

Six routes across the resort, forty-two things to go and look at, and behind every one of them a plain statement of who said so. Start with the clue, look with your own eyes, then read what it is and what the record holds.

The cover drawn for these trails, and it is two drawings stacked. The top half is an illustrated map: it is drawn rather than surveyed, no route on it is a route at Walt Disney World, and nothing on i
Illustration, not evidenceThe cover drawn for these trails, and it is two drawings stacked. The top half is an illustrated map: it is drawn rather than surveyed, no route on it is a route at Walt Disney World, and nothing on it locates anything. The bottom half is a mock-up of the hand-built reader's page these six trails came out of, not of this page: its tabs, its buttons and its row of stamps belong to that drawing.

What these are

Each trail is one page and one page is one kind of looking. A Hidden Mickey and a window above a shop are not the same hunt, and somebody searching for what stood where Princess Fairytale Hall is now is not searching for the same thing as somebody searching for a shape in a mural. So there are six URLs and each one answers about one question.

Every find carries the same four things: the clue, what it is once you have seen it, the source it was published in, and whatever this house can put beside that source — Disney’s own listing for the place, a dated guide-map printing, a row out of one of the workbooks, or the pair of sheets between which a name left the map. 37 of the 42 finds reach at least one of those. Five reach nothing, and each of the five says so.

The six trails

7 finds · 0 on Disney’s own source · 7 with the house’s own evidenceHidden MickeysSeven current finds drawn from a much larger status-checked catalog. Start with the clue, look with your own eyes, then open the evidence.

For the search: hidden mickeys at magic kingdom, epcot and the resorts

7 finds · 6 on Disney’s own source · 7 with the house’s own evidenceS.E.A.Follow the Society of Explorers and Adventurers through portraits, letters, fezzes, maps, shipwrecks and artifacts hidden across the resort.

For the search: s.e.a. at disney world, and which parts Disney says itself

7 finds · 0 on Disney’s own source · 7 with the house’s own evidenceFind the ThrowbackFind the pieces, symbols, sounds and jokes that Imagineers carried forward when an older attraction made way for something new.

For the search: what was kept from the ride that used to be here

7 finds · 4 on Disney’s own source · 7 with the house’s own evidenceWhat Stood Here?Stand in a current queue, show building or land and reconstruct the attraction that occupied the same footprint before it.

For the search: what was there before Princess Fairytale Hall, Cosmic Rewind, Frozen Ever After

7 finds · 1 on Disney’s own source · 4 with the house’s own evidenceStand Where It HappenedMatch the place to a real photograph, signature or historic event. Some are exact marks under your feet; others are the surviving public viewpoint.

For the search: where the resort was dedicated, and where the photographs were taken

7 finds · 0 on Disney’s own source · 5 with the house’s own evidenceImagineering FootprintsRead Main Street's upper windows as end credits. Each fictional business quietly names artists, engineers and leaders who built the parks.

For the search: main street windows at magic kingdom, and who they name

Guided by Trixie

Trixie the Time Traveler at a signpost
House artTrixie at the signpost, from the same set of house art.

Trixie the Time Traveler is the guide for this hunt. She also guides Trixie’s Time Adventures on the TrixiePlanner front page: ten stops through places and people Disney names. Her lines on these pages are quoted as hers.

Your own record

A reader keeping track of what they have seen is collecting, and these pages support it. What they do not do is turn it into a score: there is no total set against another reader, no ranking of one find above another, no badge and no streak. The three difficulty words the original page carried on the Hidden Mickey finds — they graded the finds against each other — were removed for that reason, and a build that lets one back onto a page fails.

Marking a find is a convenience for a reader and not a record this house keeps. It is written into this browser's own storage on this device; it is never sent anywhere, it is never counted against another reader, and there is no badge, no streak and no leaderboard at the end of it. With scripts switched off there is no button, and nothing else on this page changes.

What a find rests on

Who published it
Disney’s own page — disneyworld.disney.go.com, d23.com or disneyparksblog.com — or somebody else’s. 11 of the 42 finds rest on Disney’s own; 31 do not.
Standing
LEAD, on all 42. Opening the operator’s page for the place does not open it on the claim, so a find stays a lead until a page is opened on the claim itself. Nothing on these pages is settled by having been published.
Disney lists the place
37 finds reach a Field File — this house’s page for a thing Walt Disney World lists. That establishes the place. It establishes nothing about the find.
Disney printed the name
13 finds reach a dated guide-map printing run off Disney’s own paper, which is the strongest thing in this set.
This house wrote it down
14 finds reach a row in the Hidden Mickey workbook or the S.E.A. workbook, each row carrying its own owner and its own standing.
A name left the map
3 finds reach a succession pair: the last sheet a name was printed on, the first sheet without it, and the pool of names that began printing after the gap. The pool proposes and nothing more; a person rules.
Nothing at all
5 of 42 finds reach nothing this house holds. They say so on their own line rather than leaving a reader to assume more.

A printing run is Disney's own paper. Two kinds of sheet are read for it: one carries the operator's own digital text, the other was read by machine off folded paper. Both can attest that a name was printed on a dated sheet. Neither can anchor an absence, so a run states its own reading for its first and last sheet.

The illustrated night map from the same set. Also drawn rather than surveyed. It shows no real land, and it is carried here as decoration, never as evidence for any find on these pages.
Illustration, not evidenceThe illustrated night map from the same set. Also drawn rather than surveyed. It shows no real land, and it is carried here as decoration, never as evidence for any find on these pages.

Who published the forty-two

11 of the 42 finds rest on a page Disney owns; 31 rest on somebody else's. That is stated here rather than smoothed over, because it is the honest weakness of a hunt like this and it is the reason every find below carries whatever this house holds of its own.

HostFindsWho owns it
mymagictrip.app7SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
wdwmousing.com7SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
d23.com5DISNEY IS THE SOURCE
disneyparksblog.com5DISNEY IS THE SOURCE
waltdatedworld.com4SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
touringplans.com2SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
wdwinfo.com2SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
allears.net1SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
atlasobscura.com1SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
attractionsmagazine.com1SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
blogmickey.com1SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
businessinsider.com1SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
disneyworld.disney.go.com1DISNEY IS THE SOURCE
ew.com1SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
jungleskipper.com1SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
obamawhitehouse.archives.gov1SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE
presidency.ucsb.edu1SOMEBODY ELSE IS THE SOURCE

Crowd-sourced encyclopedias, media commons and fan wikis are not a source in this house. None appears above, none may be added, and the build fails if one ever reaches a page.

Where the rest of this lives

The front door
TrixiePlanner — plan a day on the map, and the resort year by year.
The guide’s own pages
Trixie’s Time Adventures — ten stops, and the places and people in them, every one standing on a page Disney publishes.
What Disney lists
the Field Files — one page for each thing Walt Disney World lists, and the page every find on these trails links into.
The S.E.A. workbook
Who Says So — S.E.A. at Walt Disney World — the Society row by row, each graded by who owns it.
The Hidden Mickey record
Hidden Mickeys at Walt Disney World — the full catalogue, including the shapes that are gone and the reason Disney names none of them.
Built the same way
Walt Saw It. Disney Built It. — six stories about what Walt saw and what Disney built, with the same evidence discipline.