American Discovery Trail: Sinking Spring, Ohio

This week we are near Sinking Spring, Ohio, in the south of the state, and from here we are headed south and actually east a bit until we get close to the Ohio River and the border with Kentucky, at which point we will turn west and roughly follow the river.

The first sight on our walk this week is the Fort Hill State Memorial and Nature Preserve, site of a 48-acre prehistoric Indian earthwork, pictured here and thought to have been built by Hopewell Indians. The hill in the picture is the actual Indian mound, so you can see it is quite large.

Not far from Fort Hill is this serpent mound, the largest one in the world. It is only three feet high, but 1,348 feet long, and it is over 2,100 years old, although it was rebuilt or repaired maybe 900 years ago. It looks to me as though you can walk on a path around it, and I want to do that one day, if I find myself in the area.

I am walking now to the town of Marble Furnace, which is a nice name, but unfortunately the Internet pictures of Marble Furnace are not much to see, so this is a picture of Mount Thor in Nunavut, Canada.

Nunavut is a Canadian province north of Manitoba and Quebec, mostly north of Hudson Bay, with about half of its territory north of the northernmost point in Alaska. It's way north.

With just under 37,000 people in a land area close to the size of Mexico, it is the least populated major area on earth other than Antarctica, even less densely populated than Greenland. I do not think that I will ever go there, but it looks wild and impressive.

Tomorrow, I will be halfway across Ohio, as the trail runs. It looks like I entered the state two months ago, on February 7, so chances are I will finally get to Indiana two months from now, in early June.