Where there’s a will (to cheat), there’s a way (to use cheats to functionally climb a real-life mountain in the wilderness of Montana).
Recently, Pokémon Go player BootsMade4Walking’s tale of triumph quickly gave way to a cautionary tale. Yesterday on Reddit, they posted a screenshot of a gym they’ve held for three and a half years—1,332 days, to be precise.
“Ninetales still goin’ strong,” they wrote (via Dexerto), adding that they censored the exact location of the gym “for his protection.”
Other players warned that spoofers—people who cheat to spoof their in-game locations—would feast on the Poké-pie BootsMade4Walking left on their Poké-windowsill, and that’s exactly what ended up happening. Not long after basking in glory, they amended their post to deliver some bad news.
“Lol, a spoofer took it down,” they wrote. “Didn’t even have a name. They figured it [out] from the pic.”
Need for secrecy thoroughly out the window, BootsMade4Walking went on to explain that the gym was in Blue Mountain Observatory near Lolo, Montana. Operated by the University of Montana, it’s located on top of Blue Mountain at an elevation of 6,300 feet.
“The roads are closed most of the year because of snow, so hiking is the only way up there,” they wrote. “I was up there working on the fire tower adjacent to it when Lolo was burning in 2017.”
Now the remote gym belongs to some jerk Redditor, but BootsMade4Walking doesn’t really mind. They got what they went there for—which was presumably putting out fires at the time, but also, eventually, a very specific number.
“I got my 1,331 days, which was my goal, so it doesn’t bother me,” they said, noting that 1,331 is Pokémon Go developer Niantic’s favorite number for a bunch of convoluted reasons related to Ingress, the first game to really put it on the map.
“Spoofers suck balls,” BootsMade4Walking wrote, “but I’m not gonna not post because of them.”