Tuesday, November 04, 2008

NY Mountaintop site - part 1

by theseventhgeneration
Here is a site in central NY that I found this weekend. I had no leads on the site, but have explored both east/northeast and west/southwest of here in the past. I previously posted one of those two visits on Rock Piles here.

Thinking I've already seen all there is here, I would not have gone back out to this site, but for one reason. I've been reading "Manitou" by Mavor and Dix and contemplating the relationship between the Upton Chamber and the Pratt Hill mounds.

There is site I've posted about on Two Headwaters here which we've always called "the bowl". If you go to the 11th picture down, of the stone row in the snow, you can see a mountain in the background. This post is of that mountaintop, which I'll call "Site 1". Site 1 faces "the bowl". Additionally, above "the bowl" is a site of large rock piles (click here for one example) and "marker pile" site. The bowl and Site 1 are over 1.5 miles apart. The rock piles at both sites, I think, are too small to see each other with the naked eye from that distance. So, I'm not trying to interpret this as being the same as what Mavor and Dix found in "Manitou", I just think it's interesting that I walked right up to this site after reading this part of "Manitou".

This map piece labels "the bowl" to the northeast and "Site 1" to the southwest (circled in blue).On my walk up, I approached from the southwest and found this wedge:

Then, at the summit, walked right up to this short stretch of north/south stone row:
All of the rock piles in this post are on the flat at the eastern summit. They are all to the east of the stone row. Although the mountain ascends to the west of the short stone row, there are no rock piles to the west of the stone row. There are at least 12 rock piles on the flat and here are a few:



To be continued...

2 comments :

pwax said...

It is so great that these have been preserved.

theseventhgeneration said...

I hope it stays that way. They are adjacent to a clear cut, so there has been activity near them (I think you can see a cut stump in one of the pictures). The potential exists for this land to be leased out for natural gas drilling which not only includes the well pad, but also all the infrastructure (roads, pipeline, compressors, storage facilities) that go along with the industry.