Had never heard of Bodie, Calif., before, so am grateful to you for that link; it looks like a most interesting & thought-provoking destination to add onto one’s bucket-list of places one will hopefully get to visit & perhaps camp at one day. Meditative & hauntingly-beautiful places like that are indeed precious to know about.
As far as the Chemistry problem-solving bit’s concerned, the solution eventually arrived at, by two independent strokes of sheer good luck (the first in November 2001 in upstate NY, with the final ‘keystone’ piece not coming into view until the Spring of 2018 while in western Canada), wasn’t at all along the lines that one had originally expected that it might be successfully delineated on first embarking upon the problem’s consideration back in 1986, after having heard about it from the Departmental Chair (Chem.) at that time. Anyhow, am somewhat ashamed to admit to having rather selfishly ‘sat on’ the solution for almost 3yrs now, just in case something else that’ll later seem obvious might ‘fall out’ of it (i.e., realisation-wise), before proceeding to share the thing widely (& then feeling ‘dense’ if one had missed an obvious implication/aspect). But, as nothing such has so far occurred, & as one is ageing in the midst of a pandemic, am currently considering submitting it for publication in something like J.Chem.Ed., or to a journal in Biology, or perhaps even to a “freethinker” type of journal. But yes, the 32yrs of wondering (& wandering) was worth the solution intellectually, although it’s humbling to realise that someone of similarly mediocre abilities could actually have solved it this way in the Spring/Summer of 1953, 11yrs before your correspondent was even born.