The Serpent on the Ridge
By: Mike Luoma
Tags: Discovery, History, Ancient History, Native Americans, Creative Non Fiction

Raven Ridge is about seven miles from the shore of Lake Champlain in Northwestern Vermont. Lewis Creek creeps towards the lake to the North of the ridge, while Otter Creek rumbles into Champlain to the South. Northern New York and its Adirondacks line the western side of Lake Champlain, Vermont and its Green Mountains slope down on the east. The northern reach of the lake stretches over into Quebec, Canada.

Champ! A playful sea serpent… Mascot for Burlington, Vermont’s Minor League Baseball Team the Lake Monsters. Image Credit: The Vermont Lake Monsters.

The deep, glacier carved lake is said to possess a sinewy monster in its dark depths similar to “Nessie” of Loch Ness, this one given the nickname “Champ”.

Like Nessie and Loch Ness, Champ is a part of pop culture around the lake, appearing on souvenirs, T-Shirts and the like. Burlington, Vermont’s minor league baseball club is even nicknamed The Vermont Lake Monsters — Champ is their mascot.

Legends of a lake monster go back deep into history here, however, and predate Nessie sightings in Scotland, according to writer Robert Batholomew in The Untold Story of Champ.

A Great Horned Serpent. Portrait Credit: Miguel Dominado.

Native Abenakis warned 17th century French explorers, hunters, and trappers, of monsters in Lake Champlain (or Bitawbagok — the Abenaki name for the lake), and cautioned them to be quiet in their canoes — lest they draw the monsters’ unwanted attentions.

They also used to tell stories of a mysterious “horned serpent”. The Abenaki had a name for an aquatic beast they called Gitaskogak, Gitaskog, or Peetaskog, the “great snake” that was believed to live in Bitawbagok, according to Batholomew in The Untold Story of Champ.

At native-languages.org Gitaskog (pronounced gee-tah-skog) is described as “a lake monster, an underwater horned serpent, common to the legends of most Algonquian tribes.” Gitaskog is said to “lurk in lakes and eat humans”. All of its names are variants on the meaning “great serpent” or “big serpent.”

Other ancient Abenaki legends are tied into the lake as well. Their oral traditions bind their people to this land back into the Ice Age.

Odzihozo, or Rock Dunder, in Lake Champlain off of Burlington, Vermont. Photo Credit: Lake Champlain Ecosystem Assessment.

Some legends tell of the creation of the rivers, mountains and Lake Champlain by the shaper — not creator, but shaper — Odzihozo, which seem to tell of the shaping of the land as The Champlain Sea receded and became Lake Champlain around 8200 BC.

After carving out the lake and its surrounding mountains and rivers, Odzihozo settled down and became a rock which now sits in the lake near Burlington, called “Rock Dunder” by Westerners.

This Lake was a Sea, originally. It’s the much smaller remnant of what was, at the end of the Ice Age, The Champlain Sea. Back then, most of Vermont’s future Queen City was under about 200 feet of salt water.

Illustration of The Champlain Sea (Mer de Champlain). Photo Credit: Orbitale, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Champlain Sea lapped at the shores of what would later become Vermont at what is now about 600 feet above sea level. Much of Burlington, at around 400 feet above sea level and lower, would have been below the waves — and a bit offshore.

Thanks to the glaciers of the Ice Age, this land was actually a lot lower back then, which is why there was a sea here in the first place. The weight of the then-receding Laurentian Ice Sheet had exerted enormous pressures on the land, pushing it down near or below sea level.

After the glaciers receded, the land slowly rose back up to where it is today, cutting off the northern route connecting the Champlain Sea to the Atlantic Ocean around 8200 BC and creating the smaller, freshwater Lake Champlain. Before that, The Champlain Sea was here for a few thousand years.

Archaeologists in Northwestern Vermont generally find Paleoindian remains at about 620 feet above sea level and higher in the suburbs and surroundings of Burlington, as Paleoindians lived near the shores of the Champlain Sea around the end of the Ice Age.