New York Times, Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Ever had a song get stuck in your head? Yeah, me too….

The final iteration of this grid results from a gradual evolution from quaint earworm to NYT publication. The Happy Trails puzzle started as the reveal for a Monday puzzle containing expressions with different kinds of trails. However, as Roy Rogers and Dale Evans attest to in the song, "Some trails are happy ones, others are blue." While ski and hiking trails may indeed make people happy, paper and vapor trails may not.

That left me singing a different song, "Road to Nowhere," for a while during the construction of this one. So, I put the concept on ice for the winter and then revisited it with some freshness in the spring. Once I thought of creating winding trails out of the circles, it only became a matter of filling them with workable synonyms for "happy."

Adding the two singers' convenient nine-letter names into the grid rounded out the puzzle and gave it a stronger identity more fitting for a Wednesday publication.

HAPPY TRAILS to Wednesday solvers! There's something JOYFUL about featuring so many MERRY words throughout the puzzle.

I enjoyed the touch of incorporating two iconic old West singers, DALE EVANS and ROY ROGERS. Perfect for an old-timey HAPPY TRAILS theme.

Regular readers know precisely what I'm going to say about themes that require diagonal / twisting theme entries: Will Shortz is less frequently considering them since they force too many fill constraints. Although he's stated this as recently as mid-2021, he sure has published a lot of them lately! I imagine he's working through his backlog.

(Outdated ICHAT + HAAS + STD around GLAD, and that's just to kick off the puzzle … you get the idea.)

I appreciated that Mike put his longer slots to work, HILARITY and ANY IDEAS lifting solvers who thought the theme might GO FLAT. Neat mid-lengthers, too, some JESTERS and the ancient KNOSSOS adding color. That is not easy to do, especially in the lower left and upper right corners, where you have to trade-off sizzle vs. smoothness in a biggish region that already has triple-checking constraints.

At first, the six HAPPY paths felt too random, going every which way, but it struck me afterward that it's a nice expression of a happy-go-lucky approach to life. It also helped Mike to reduce the gluey short bit, too — being able to twist and turn in every which way is such a huge boon to optimizing fill.