Wednesday, August 6, 2008

More on a Carving

This article is a follow-up to the last two articles I posted about carved symbols. The symbols in this photo are the next four symbols in the carving that started with what looked like the letter D.

Again, I will apologize for the crappy photo and the chalk. Treasure hunting has a learning curve to it and this was back in my infant days. I still had hair back then and that cheap digital camera! When I return to this site during the winter I will endeavor to take some new and better photos of the carving. This won’t do you much good right now but at least you’ll know I’m trying.

As with the first part of this carving, by putting chalk on the symbols I inadvertently made it harder to work the carving. With these symbols chalked it appears that there is a letter F in this carving but that is not actually so. The F is two symbols made to look like one if you aren’t paying attention.

The first part of the symbol, the top part of the F, could be described as a square U laying on it’s side. The second part of the symbol is a simple short, straight line that when looked at without the chalk does not really connect to the square U part of the carving. This makes the F two symbols and not one.

The symbols in the map before these had me traveling a straight line along the side of the hill; the top part of the F in this map depicts a large rectangle shape rock sticking out of the side of the hill. This large rectangle rock is the marker to use your next symbol from. The next symbol, the short, straight line is telling you to follow a line from the rectangle rock. Normally, this type of line could work two ways. You could take a line off of one of the corners of the rectangle rock using the point of the corner or one of the straight edges as a direction or there can be something specific on the rock that gives you a direction. In this case, there was a straight line carved into the top of the rectangle rock that pointed the direction to go.

The two dots after this F looking symbol were giving a distance. They told me I needed to go “two” of some distance. In this kind of distance marking you just have to start looking for the next clue to determine what the distance is that you are to go two of. Generally speaking, distances will be in 10’s, 50’s or 100’s and this could be feet, paces or yards but this all varies on who made the carving and what they wanted to use. You could have some arbitrary number that the carver liked to use or you could be dealing with “chains”, the distances used by surveyors, etc. It can be almost anything.

In any case, these two “distances” were in tens, of feet that is, so my distance to travel from the rectangle rock was 20 feet.

The next symbol really confused the crap out of me for a very long time. Even without the chalk on it this carving appears to be the letter y. Simple logic would dictate that I would come to a Y in the trail, maybe a gully or something else that gave me two directions to go. This wasn’t the case in this carving and it was only after I found what I was supposed to find that I was able to put an interpretation to this symbol.

This Y is actually a long line showing the side of the hill from top to bottom. You can see how it is slanted to the right slightly to show the incline of the hill. The short line intersecting with the long line is pointing at the side of the hill telling me that what I am looking for is IN or actually come out of the side of the hill. The short line also happens to be at the same spot on the long line as the hole (probable tunnel) is to the hillside.

It makes a lot of sense once you see it but until that time it really drives you nuts!

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