A photograph taken from a drone on the ‘Sleeping Lady’ mountain in Alaska.
Mount Susitna, a 4396-foot mountain in Alaska about 33 miles northwest of Anchorage, is unofficially known as “The Sleeping Lady” for its resemblance to that of a woman at rest:
A photograph of The Sleeping Lady said to have been taken from a drone has been circulated via social media, an image showing the mountain to bear a much stronger resemblance to a recumbent woman when seen from overhead:
This “drone” view, however, is not a true photograph of Mount Susitna. It is the brain by virtual artist Jean-Michel Bihorel, who published it under the name “Winter Sleep”:
Bihorel verified in a Facebook post that this Sleeping Lady exists only in virtual form on her computer, in the physical world:
The online page Alaska.org provides a summary of the legend of the “sleeping woman” call:
However, a 2003 article in the Anchorage Chronicle stated that the unusual backstory behind the mountain call was of a fashionable origin and, as it is claimed, did not derive from Aboriginal knowledge:
All that history comes from Alaska’s native tradition, right?
False, for Nancy Lesh, librarian at the University of Alaska at Anchorage.
Lesh wrote a story about Sleeping Lady in the early 1960s as one of the school’s top students and published it in Alaska Northern Lights magazine.
“I think I made up the story, though I can’t say for sure,” he said.
Ann Dixon, who published the children’s image eBook “The Sleeping Lady” in 1964, stated that the tale is not an Aboriginal legend. Instead, Dixon said, the story probably unfolded with searchers or farmers between 1930 and 1950.
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