"This months column is about a very favorite psychic place to wich travel. The good news is this special place is within a day's drive from Dallas (up 75 to Denison, Texas, highway 69 to Mc Alester, Ocklahoma, then east on 270 to Heavener, Ocklahoma.) What psychic adventure could one possible find in the sleepy little town of Heavener, Oklahoma? Two mile northeast of the town, within the upper crest of 2,500 foot high Poteau Mountain, is a deep, magical ravine surrounded by steep cliff-like walls. In the center of that ravine is a runestone - no minor runestone, it stands 12 feet high, 10 feet wide, and 16 inches thick - a runic billboard.

The bad news is the best time to visit the runestone was no later than 1967, you could have camped in the magical ravine as I did and studied, even ran your fingers within the giant runic engravings.

Shortly afterwards, the runestone was placed in protective custody within a giant wire cage. Today, the runestone seems to be a bit overprotected. The wire cage has been replaced with a wood frame building, and your view of the runestone must be from the other side of a glass window.

You see, this is not the first time I have written an article about the Heavener runestone. My first effort was published as the cover story in the January, 1969, issue of Sience Digest magazine. My article then evolved into chapter in the bok, Lost Cities and Forgotten Tribes, an anthology of archeological mysteries introduced and edited by Isaac Asimov and Richard Dempewolff.

During all that publicity, Poteau Mountain became Runestone State Park, comlete with the usual masses of tourists. For my effort with the Viking runestone, I gained the dubious honor of being made an "Admiral" by the Governer of Oklahoma.

The full story of the runestone's discovery as well as extensive information regarding runic alphabets, etc. are contained within xeroded copies of my Science Digest article wich are available to you at the TAP library. If you have not visited or used the library at TAP's headquarters, you make that the destination of your next psycic jourrney.

The Science Digest article concludes with a scholarly debate over the translation of the message on the runestone. The debate was caused byt the fact that a simple translation, GNOMEDAL (value of the gnomes) was mos unacceptable to Runic scholars. To such scholars, it just had to be a cryptic message of historical worth. So, runic cryptograms were argued back and forth (OK, when you read the article, I had my own crytpogram on the stack - it was good enough for some scholastic honors from the University of Cardiff).

Two years later, I had to discard forever my cryptogram and Welsh honors... I was packing away the runestone material and just happened to pay extra attention to a photo on a proof sheet. It was a photo of the Poteau Runestone (a much smaller, secondary runestone found in the area) that had been brought into Heavener for me to photograph.

The photo had been previously ignored because there was a blur at the top area of the runestone. With that last, packing-away look, I took a closer look, then rushed to a friend's darkroom. The enlarged portion of that photo is seen below. And, well, in this case, one photo is very much worth a thousand words. You study the photo for yourself and see if that ancient runic inscription was correct.

Now you know why Poteau Mountain sill remains as a "very favorite psychic place". Without a doubt, the ancient visitor who inscribed the message as psychic enough to know how magic the ravine is. The stone may be all caged up, but the magic ravine remains open for your visit.

And, you can feel those extra, ancient residents of the ravine. Don't be overly focused on trying to take your own gnome photo. It wll depends on the mood of the little nature spirits. I didn't see the image on the photo as I took the picture. Apparently, the one little guy just wanted to add a bit of personal verification to the runic message. TAP