Serpent Mound

One of the places Isaac and I went during our little trip was to Serpent Mound.  If you're not familiar with Serpent Mound, you can read about it here. 

It was interesting to see.  After we walked around the Mound, we did some hiking in the woods nearby.

And in a clearing in the forest, we came across this.

It is what looks like some sort of altar at the base of a big old tree.  There is a statue of a woman's face, some antlers (deer, I would imagine), a long stick, and ribbons of different colors tied to a string wrapped around the trunk of the tree.  It was really neat to discover it.  It felt like a place someone had been doing rituals.  I wished I had something to leave as an offering but I had nothing with me.  I did, however, pay my respect by not allowing Isaac to pee on it.

I was really curious about it.  I wondered if the park staff knew it was there.  It was not that far from the little museum/gift shop, maybe a 10 minute walk, so it's hard to believe it hadn't been discovered.  On the other hand, it's hard to imagine the park staff would leave it there or allow people to do rituals on the park grounds, if they knew about it.

I thought about stopping in the museum/gift shop before we left and asking if they knew about it.  But I decided not to, because if they didn't know, I didn't want them to go looking for it and take it away.  So I decided to just let it be a mystery.