Unexplored area

Going back through some photos, I found one that I took last fall:



It's right along side of a one lane dirt road on state land. I dismissed it at the time because the proximity to the road and the tree growing up behind it gives this stone no context.

All of the state land behind this stone, I have not yet explored. The snow is very deep right now (over a foot) with more expected for Friday, so I haven't been exploring any new areas lately and probably won't be able to get out this weekend.

Rock Piles Blog

I've been posting at the Rock Piles Blog lately, so click on the title above and head on over there.

Here are a couple of non-rock pile related photos, although, both were taken in the area of Delaware State Forest where there are plenty of rock piles and cairns to be found.

Adult University

This course looked interesting (click on the heading for the link). But then, look at the last sentence! I'm sure Princeton would not have committed this kind of faux pas!

Comparisons

I've been going over some photos and I can't help but recognize similarities between certain rocks or features of rocks that I've see in different places. I'd like to put some of them up here, side by side, to highlight the similarities.

These are rocks that have similar shape.

In each of the first two photos, the rock in the center of the pile supports the rock above it, that is very flat. These supporting rocks have very similar shapes:




These next two take on an "upside down and backwards" look to the prior two. Although one is a boulder, the resemblance in shape of these two, I think, is uncanny.





This is all pure conjecture, but it sure is interesting!

A couple of links - Stone heaps and relics

I found a couple of good web pages that have some information on local Indian stone piles and relics discovered long ago. The first one is here: Wikisource - The Old New York Frontier - Part 1 - Chapter 2

If you skip down to [3] it talks about a long heap of stones, called the Indian Monument, about one mile below Unadilla village. Under [4] the second paragraph talks about the "Knoll" at Sidney which "was level on top, some fifteen feet high, and across the top measured about ten rods".

The second link is at the Delaware County NY website and is here: Chapter 1 - Geology, Prehistory and Historical Background

About a third of the way down the paragraph starts: "A hilltop stone workshop and other ancient relics." It's interesting, paraphrasing the article, that in the 1930's they discovered numerous stone artifacts on a high summit that is between the Delaware and Susquehanna watersheds. However, they found few potsherds and only two clay pipes.

In that same (Delaware County NY) article, if you skip down to the sentence after footnote 33, there is an interesting reference to a post contact Indian village in Windsor, NY.