Mount Shasta's Forgotten History & Legends by Dustin Naef

Author:Dustin Naef [Naef, Dustin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780981606668
Amazon: 0981606660
Publisher: Riven Books
Published: 2016-09-29T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Starry Cave

For the most part, visitors to Lava Beds National Monument are allowed unrestricted access to all of the tunnels and caves found throughout the park—all except for one of them.

One of these places, Fern Cave, is so secret that the public is not allowed inside of it except when accompanied by a ranger, and only then on a very limited basis throughout the year. The cave entrance is locked with an iron grating. No photographs or filming is allowed inside of the cave anymore. The rangers have explicit instructions on where visitors are allowed to go inside the cave. People are limited to the general area around the ferns, which are themselves a mystery, growing just below the entrance. [202]

According to Lava Beds internal cave management documents, plans to install sensors outside of the cave were drafted, which would detect any approach and send a signal to Park Rangers. An additional sensor was proposed to be located inside of the cave to detect if anyone deviated from the approved areas during a public tour [including the rangers themselves]. The sensors would be monitored 24 hours a day.

Right off there are a number of unusual things about Fern Cave. For one thing, it is in the middle of the desert and has ferns growing inside of it; the nearest similar ferns are located in the coastal California Redwoods over 100 miles away. It is said to be one of only two known caves in Lava Beds where habitation debris has been found. It contains an extensive array of unusual, well-preserved pictographs of indeterminate meaning and unknown antiquity. It also contains multiple deposits of human remains, and at least one funerary object, both of undisclosed age, character, and origin. It is one of the few caves in the park that the public is barred from [others being restricted due to ecological concerns], but open access is allowed to members of the Modoc or Klamath tribes. It is also still actively used by some tribal members for rituals and vision quests.

Fern Cave is said to be one of the most powerful and important places a Modoc could travel to without leaving home.

The cave has been used by the Modocs, as well as their predecessors, for thousands of years. There are considerably more humanoid-like pictographs covering the walls of Fern Cave, which appear to be rendered in a different style, suggesting an unusual meaning and antiquity.

My overall impression of the interior of Fern Cave is that it looks like a depiction of something mysterious and otherworldly happening in the starry night skies, which was witnessed and recorded on the walls of the cave. There’s a mind-boggling array of human-like figures represented against an oceanic backdrop of otherworldly entities, strange geometry, cosmic imagery, and other insectoid and amoeba-like creatures that seem to defy description.

Many of the pictographs inside Fern Cave are estimated to be no older than roughly 1,500 years, based on dating analysis of the kind of paint found on the cave’s

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.