Serpent of Dreams
A Ridge-Top Serpent and Effigy Stones in Northwestern Vermont
A Ridge-Top Serpent and Effigy Stones in Northwestern Vermont
A history-making discovery? Walking across the wetlands on the boardwalk towards Raven Ridge in Monkton, Vermont, I had no idea what I was about to find. My plan was a short hike. The discoveries made were entirely unexpected.
Raven Ridge is preserved and protected by The Nature Conservancy (Nature.org). If you visit, please remember not to disturb anything — look (or take pictures and video), but please be respectful.
In addition to my writing and research, this year I’ve begun making “Experiencing” videos of the Stone Chambers and Stone Workings as I visit, a way for me to share these experiences. Even when, occasionally, I’m on a secret site whose location I can’t reveal and share.
That’s not the case here — this is a public place.
I still thought it would be worth making an Experiencing video to feature “The Oven” at Raven Ridge, an amazing looking anticline, a geological fold of rock on top of the ridge which does resemble an old stone oven.
The Oven still features in my video. It is pretty striking, as I hope you can get some idea of from my photos.
There is also a Slot Cave, or Crevice, at Raven Ridge a natural cut in the cliff top you can climb down and through during the summer months.
Breathtaking in its own right — and we climb down through it to the cave at the bottom. An action sequence! Something new for my videos.
But there is so much more to Raven Ridge…
There are effigy stones. Ancient stone walls. And a Sea Serpent has been carved and shaped out of the natural bedrock of the ridge.
There are also many more less-obvious signs of Native American stone work present all over the site. I’ve chosen to focus on those I felt were clear to be seen.
This evidence clearly demonstrates prehistoric Native Americans in Northeast North America not only worked with stone, but did so on a scale previously inconceivable to Western minds limited by historic racial prejudice.
What’s more, this doesn’t require accepting astronomical alignments or any other more esoteric interpretations of the stones. You can see the evidence with your own eyes, including stone chisel marks on a fin on the side of the Sea Serpent and LIDAR to support my claim.
There are bigger fins and flippers, too, as seen in passing in the video, but I focus on the small fin because it is so obviously the handiwork of a human being.
There are obvious elements to The Fish and The Narwhal (or Turtle) Effigy Stones as well. I lean towards Narwhal because I think we can see where the tusk was broken off. There are many other possible effigy stones on site as well.
There are also too many ancient stone walls and stone piles to count, and some interact curiously with the striking natural cliffs and bluffs, which have been described as looking like “the walls of an ancient city”.
I do speculate on a possible “Indian Fort” and a Rockshelter in the video, but this is clearly only speculation on my part.
I leave the walls and stone piles for another day, because I believe what you’ll see is rather obvious. There is so much here!
Because there is so much stonework here of such variety, it appears this site acquired ritual significance and was added to over many successive generations. The abundance and variety of natural stone, some already twisted into wild geologic formations, provided an ample canvas for the work.
The aquatic life portrayed on the ridge suggests this could date back to the time of the Champlain Sea and the early Paleo Indian settlers of Vermont.
Lake Champlain today supposedly contains a Sea Serpent of sorts, the legendary monster nicknamed “Champ”. The minor league baseball team in Burlington, Vermont is known as the Vermont Lake Monsters, and you can find Champ’s likeness on everything from T-Shirts to key chains. And now, perhaps, on a ridge in Monkton as well.
It seems the legends of a lake creature like Champ could go very far back, indeed. Could it be that, in the days after the last Ice Age, when the Champlain Sea still lapped at the foot of Raven Ridge, there was more than one Champ swimming in it?
It’s rather surprising to me no one has noticed these things before. Perhaps too many prejudices and preconceived notions have been in the way. Many will be skeptical. I understand that. These are substantial hypotheses. If you’d like to learn more, please watch the video. The stones show up better in video, for some reason. Revelations begin about a third of the way in, easily verifiable discoveries, proven in the video.
It’s time to look at these stones very differently.
The video is available HERE on YouTube.
Thank you.
Mike Luoma, September 9th, 2020.