Shucks. Nobody won a WSGS cupcake from answering last week’s mystery question. Nobody knew where the “Scrappy Sasquatch” was located. WELL! It’s in Elbe (near Mount Rainier, west side) and is in a personal roadside sculpture park on State Route 706 on your way to Paradise Lodge and the park. Google “En Nihilo Spirits of Iron Sculpture Park” to see all of Daniel Klennert’s creations.
Today I have a mystery for you of a totally different ilk. I found this wooden carved “thing” floating in Long Lake. This is the Spokane River where a lake has been formed (Long Lake) behind a dam (before continuing on its way into the Columbia River).
The blue glass is there for size comparison. Doing a bit of research, this is the ancient Hindu elephant god Ganesha, “one of the best known objects of devotion in the Hindu religion.” Notice especially the legs and feet positions. It’s carved from some very dark wood and must not have been in the water too long for it was not weathered or rotten a bit.
The mystery is how on earth did THAT get to be floating in Long Lake????? Especially in the lower end stretch, way past the houses and nearer to the dam, floating at lake’s edge amidst the weeds, plastic and driftwood. If you care to make up a story solving this mystery, I’d love to hear from you with said story!
Well this years spring runoff was the largest runoff since 2008, so since it did not look like it had been in the lake very long it was probably dropped by someone upriver somewhere in the last 9 years.
There was a very old Hindu man traveling by wagon train in the 1880s through these parts. The wagon train was raided by Indians and many things were stolen. Obviously, this fell out of the bag of “loot”, or was discarded by the Indians because they had no idea what it represented.
A group of Hindus were holding a seance on a luxury houseboat on long lake and offered this to the river god.