Getting the flavor of...The land of ‘Mothman,’ and more

The land of ‘Mothman’

The glowing red eyes of a 12-foot-tall creature—part man, part insect—overlook the center of Point Pleasant, W.Va., said Katie Heaney in Outside. But fear not: This is only a statue of “Mothman”—a stainless-steel commemoration of the strange flying figure that several residents claimed to have seen in 1967 shortly before the town’s bridge over the Ohio River collapsed. Some locals have insisted ever since that the disaster and Mothman’s appearance were linked, but plenty of others accept that a type of very large heron just happened to have passed through at a fateful moment. The myth nonetheless spawned a 2002 Richard Gere movie and a healthy trade in Mothman paraphernalia. Pick up a T-shirt at the town’s Mothman Museum and Gift Shop (mothmanmuseum.com) or enjoy a Mothman pie at Village Pizza. It features red-bell-pepper eyes, mushroom wings, and a pepperoni body.

Utah’s Anasazi shadows

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Utah’s rugged Cedar Mesa harbors a treasure trove of untouched Native American ruins, said Kate Siber in The Washington Post. The 70-mile plateau was occupied about 700 to 2,000 years ago by Ancestral Puebloans—commonly known as the Anasazi—and few modern visitors have even set eyes on the hundreds of dwellings they left behind. During a recent weekend camping trip, friends and I wandered the mesa’s “riddle of canyons and sandstone spires” with discovery on our minds. This beautifully barren federal land offers little in the way of trails or signs, but that’s “a large part of its appeal.” We stumbled across one ruin that seemed to be watched over by a haunting pictograph of a humanoid figure with antlers. Elsewhere, we came upon a whole group of stone-and-mortar ruins whose sandy floors were still scattered with dried-out corn cobs and shards of ancient pottery. “I felt as if I were standing among ghosts.”