One of the principles of The Gentle Art of Wandering is that most wandering adventures start with an idea. The idea is what gets most of us out to wander. Ideas can come from anywhere, and once you spot an idea, it makes sense to write it down somewhere so you remember it.

I found an idea in the January 2011 issue of National Geographic. It was an article about Cahokia Mounds across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. The article even had a picture of the last remaining Cahokian Mound in the City of St. Louis called Sugar Loaf Mound.

As background, a little less than one thousand years ago the St. Louis area was home to an important Native-American mound building culture (Mississippian or Cahokian). The center of Cahokian culture was just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis near Collinsville, Illinois.

You can still visit many of the mounds at Cahokia State Park in Illinois. The largest mound, Monks Mound, is over 90 feet high and covers over 13 acres of land. It’s huge.

That hill in front of you is Monks Mound. It is as tall as a ten-story building. It was built almost 1000 years ago – one basketful of dirt at a time.

As for Sugar Loaf Mound in St. Louis, I had visited Cahokia several times and knew that St. Louis was once called the Mound City because of the many Indian mounds that used to be in the city. But I had never visited a mound in St. Louis and had thought that they had all been destroyed.

Needless to say, I made a point of finding Sugar Loaf Mound when I drove through St. Louis on my way to conference a little over a year ago.

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