A Strange Symbol

A few articles back I wrote about one of those very easy symbols to interpret that we all hope to find a lot of at every site, OK, even one or two would be nice! Unfortunately, it seems the easy symbols are few and far between and the harder ones are more prevalent than ever.

The symbol I have posted a photo of with this article is one such symbol. This is one of those strange symbols that didn’t seem to really make any sense. I spent a long time trying to figure this one out, along with a few others that were with this one to get to me the spot I needed to be. The guy who made this carving must have been hitting the wild wacky weed when he made it!

This particular symbol was the last symbol in a short string of eight symbols. Since this was the last symbol in the carving I assumed it told me what I was looking for but I had never seen anything like this before. My first thought, and several thoughts after that was that this symbol was meant to depict a spring, showing the person reading the map where fresh water was. With that in mind I ignored the carved map and moved on to something else. This appears to have been a big mistake on my part. Hey, everybody makes mistakes, especially me!

As I was working something else in the same area I came across two spots on the side of a hill down the valley from the carving. These spots were almost perfectly round depressions in the side of the hill that had been covered over with stones. The spots were approximately three feet across in size and both were at the same elevation on the hill as you walked around the hill. The two depressions were spaced about 19 feet from each other and during the summer the grass on the side of the hill grew tall enough that it covered these spots from view.

At this point I remembered the carving and went back to it to work it out to see where I ended up. After several trips I was able to work the carved map to the point that it actually took me took the two depressions. The depressions were only about 100 feet from the carving. I could have worked the carving quicker in a reverse engineering fashion but I didn’t want to have any preconceived ideas of where the carving would take me, just in case it actually did go to a spring. As you can guess, the carving took me to the very first depression. Since the carving showed four “fingers” I measured the distance between the first two depressions and then measured that same distance again out from the second depression. At that point I found a third rock covered depression, exactly the same as the first two. One more measurement from the third depression took me to yet another rock covered depression, all about 19 feet apart along the same elevation on the side of the hill. Needless to say, I was surprised and confused all at the same time. The oval part of the carving was depicting the hill that the depressions are on and the four “fingers” are the depressions.

At this point I can only assume that the stone covered depressions are openings to four tunnels with the depressions being caused by the back fill into the tunnels settling over time. I don’t know for sure because I haven’t tried to uncover any of them yet. I’m waiting for winter to come along so the grass and bugs, not to mention the heat, will be gone. And yes, I did check the area around all four depressions with a metal detector, three to be exact. Based on the location of the depressions on the hill side and the slope of the hill, the tunnels would only have to be about six feet long before the end of the tunnels were deeper than a two-box would detect. These are going to take a different type of machine to figure out or a lot of digging.

If you are wondering about the dot on the upper left corner of the circular part of the hill, this corresponds to the location of a cave on the opposite side of the hill. An empty cave I might add except for some more interesting carvings!

These four spots could still be four springs for all I know but based on the terrain where they are located, how close they are to the carving, the fact they are evenly spaced and all at the exact same elevation and covered with stones I am now betting against that theory. Hopefully I will have an update for you this winter.