Here I am at Sage Wall, to give you some idea of the scale.

Sage Wall is a possible megalithic site near Butte, Montana. In this post, I am going to thoroughly embarrass my geologist husband by saying that Sage Wall looks manmade to me. But first, how did I come to visit Sage Wall in person?

Getting to Sage Wall

It’s on my bucket list to visit as many archeological sites as a I can, the older the better. Sage Wall was a no-brainer because it’s only a half a day’s drive from my house. It is also a good candidate to visit because looking at photos is kind of ambiguous. To really get a sense of whether it seems manmade or like a natural formation, I felt I had to be there in person.

We drove up into the beautiful Montanan Pioneer Mountains (Idaho has some as well), stayed the night in Butte, and the next day, made our way to Sage Mountain Center, where I had a reservation. We could not have asked for a more beautiful day, weather-wise. Early June in the Butte area is still basically Spring.

Chris and Linda are the property owners at Sage Mountain. About three decades ago, they wanted to move out to the middle of nowhere and build a sustainable house and retreat center. They were not looking for megaliths. Linda stumbled upon the wall on a hike one day, and Chris, who has a background in building, looked at it, said, “Yep. That doesn’t look natural. Well, let’s get back to our projects.” It wasn’t until years later, when they had established a sustainability-themed retreat center and had started to create some hiking trails for their guests, that other people started noticing the wall. Chris and Linda cleared the brush around the wall, roped it off, and had it examined by LIDAR and ground-penetrating radar.

Now, many people are coming to see the wall, seemingly to a point where it is almost becoming a problem. Sage Mountain Center is still on a wind-y, washboard-y dirt road, but now many people, seeking to get away from it all, have built new houses and cabins along that same road. Chris asked us, as we drove out, not to “go too fast past our neighbors. We’re trying not to bother them.” I got the impression that his main desire is still to just run a sustainability B&B in peace, but he’s been saddled with this danged wall.

What Would a Skeptic Say?

I want to give the skeptical geologists their due here. I think what they would say is this: “All these people who are saying Sage Wall is amazing megalithic structure are forgetting one thing: It is right in the middle of the Boulder Batholith! There are big granite rocks everywhere!”

source: formontana.net

They are not wrong. The mountains to the east of Butte, where Sage Mountain Center is located, are strewn with large granite boulders and outcroppings. These tend to fracture into shapes resembling worked blocks of stone.

Here are some pictures I took, on the way in, of natural granite outcroppings so you can see how they normally look and how they tend to fracture:

You can see that the fractures are often horizontal and strikingly block-like.

We also saw some pieces of granite that had very large quartz crystals formed in them, which stuck out like chips in a chocolate chip cookie:

And, just for fun, here’s a balanced rock:

I’m not sure whether this balanced rock is natural, but I’m leaning towards no. I’m thinking it was put there to mark the trail.

Anyway, the skeptics are correct that the presence of big, blocky rocks does not an ancient megalithic structure make. This is part of the reason I wanted to see Sage Wall myself. I did not take any videos of it, because I’m not good with video and didn’t have a script ready. But there are now many videos of Sage Wall online, including drone videos. I’ll try to embed some of them at the end of this post.

Why Sage Wall is Likely Man-Made in my Amateur Opinion

So no, the claim is not that this must be a megalithic structure because it is located somewhere that we would not expect rocks. It is definitely surrounded by rocks. However, it looks distinctly different from the more random rock outcroppings around it.

It is very long, and very straight. (The wall extends past the Sage Mountain Center property, but only their section of it has been cleared.)

Unlike what we see with other fracturing patterns, the wall consist of very big blocks laid out in what appear to be courses. To my (again, amateur) eye, when we see natural fracturing the blocks tend to fracture into smaller pieces where they are exposed.

In the pictures above (and in the one where I’m posing), you can see a hollow lower down in the wall where a block obviously fell out.

At three different places in the exposed section of the wall, there are gaps in the top similar to doors. Chris told us there had been a lot of speculation about these before researchers realized that they were simply places where boulders had fallen out. In fact, you can see the boulders below them, almost completely buried in dirt and pine duff.

On the picture above, you can also see the remains of a triangular shape. The left side of the triangle is made with shaped blocks, and the right side is incised into the megalith. The triangle happens to frame the gap where a block fell out.

According to Chris, the geophysicist who examined the wall with ground-penetrating radar found that it goes down into the ground about another 20 feet. At the bottom was something that reflected the radar, as it might be a floor or stone foundation.

All of this research is shortly to be posted on the wall’s website, here or possibly here.

Parallel to the wall are the fallen remains of what appears to be another wall. You can see that it is “fractured” in the same way, and these other blocks also have some of the nub and cup features that we’ll talk about below.

Here’s a bit of the second wall, seen end-on.

Behind the Wall

Here’ a view behind the more intact wall. Chris and Linda have installed a rope that allows visitors to climb up behind the wall. As you can see, the wall is not just part of a cliffside, but it does have earth and rocks filled in behind, either as terraces/a retaining wall, or the ravages of time.

From behind the wall, we look out through a gap left by a fallen stone across the avenue at the remains of the second wall.

Getting close to the top of the wall allows us to see what might be nubs and cups.

Nubs and Cups

Stone nubs and cups (not necessarily corresponding to each other) are sometimes features of megalithic architecture in other parts of the world.

“Cup and ring” markings are apparently found all over the world, but especially in Northern Europe. Here are two articles about them.

Stone nubs or knobs are also found, especially in Incan or pre-Incan megalithic architecture.

Here are some nubs found on top of the intact wall.

They are not the same as the pieces of quartz sticking out of the natural stone that we photographed earlier.

Because the wall is so weathered, some of them are not certain.

Note the possible incised lines above this last nub.

Here are some other things we saw on the back of the wall:

Suspiciously square fracture line

On the fallen wall as well, we found some things that look like nubs, and some possible cups. As a nod to the skeptics, yes, these “cups” do look like they could have been caused by water erosion. This would be especially true if they were found under a waterfall or a persistent drip, which they are not, as far as I can see. Some of them are also suspiciously round.

Some also have very straight lines incised near them. My son suggested they could be a water feature.

Looks like a cup with a spout

False Nub Alarm? Or Another Part of the Complex?

As we hiked away from Sage Wall, I took care to photograph natural rock formations for comparison. Not very far from the walls, I saw something that also looked like nubs.

Did this mean that such nubs are a natural feature of the way granite weathers? Or could this be another part of the same complex as the wall? The formation on which I spotted these nubs certainly looks like the remains of a constructed passage.

A Post-Flood Megalithic Culture

After I left Sage Wall, my husband asked, humoring me, what I thought its purpose had been. My answer is that I have no idea. It is way too old, weathered, and partially buried for me to speculate. (This does not bother Julie Ryder over at Montana Megaliths, so if you want to see some people speculate very confidently, you can visit there.)

What I can say is that, granted this is not a natural formation, it most reminds me of Sacsahuayman and other sites in Peru. You have the same dry stone construction with megalithic blocks that are shaped, but are not in uniform sizes or in a regular pattern. And, of course, you have the nubs. As for scale, it appears that if Sage Wall were excavated down to its foundation, it would be thirty or forty feet high.

Another similarity is that both Sage Wall and the Incan or pre-Incan complexes are built at very high elevations (the Continental Divide runs near Butte).

This suggests to me that they partake of the same culture area.

Sage Wall, of course, has been abandoned much longer than any of the impressive Incan complexes, some of which Europeans got to witness still in use. Consequently, it’s much more weathered, run down, and filled in. But it looks like the same sort of thing.

So, it appears that Sage Wall and any other structures we might find in association with it were built by a group of people who knew how to build with megaliths, and who then had to abandon this site for some reason. It was before recorded history in North America, but that doesn’t mean it was before recorded history was happening elsewhere. Then, they or their descendants or people who partook of the same megalithic culture, moved on towards South America and continued their building there.

I believe there is plenty of evidence–not from Sage Wall, but from other sources–that human dispersion happened very quickly after the Flood, and that when people spread out, they took a megalithic culture with them. Dolmens, pyramids, cities, and inexplicable megaliths have been discovered all over the world. In many cases, as with the Bosnian pyramids, they have been abandoned for so long that they are not immediately recognizable as the work of human hands. You have to know what you are looking at before you can see it. The Bosnian pyramids, first thought to be extremely regular hills, were confirmed as artifacts only when a team dug into them and found tunnels. It looks like something similar happened with Sage Wall.

Immediately after the Flood, the earth would have entered an Ice Age. The climate was in a tailspin: temperatures were low, precipitation at an all-time high. Much of that precipitation quickly got locked up in glaciers. Sea levels fell around the newly configured continents. There were land bridges all over: in Beringia, in Doggerland, in Sundaland. People took advantage of all this newly revealed, very humid land and scattered. But the Ice Age was short, and as glaciers melted, there were sudden catastrophic local floods. People had to abandon their sites. Many of their cities, camps, and settlements are now hidden under water along our coasts. In some cases, such as Gobeklitepe and the Vinca cities, they burned, buried, or otherwise destroyed their sites before moving on. Some of these sites might have been built very quickly and inhabited for only a short time before they were abandoned. Other things being equal, archaeologists tend to overestimate how long it took to build something, and how long ago it appeared. But even very recent sites can be quite mysterious. They have had trouble re-constructing Woodstock, for example.

How Did They Build It?

I don’t know. Obviously they were purty smart. Probably an argument is going to be made that Sage Wall must be a natural formation because “we know” that people in the Stone Age didn’t have the ability to make things like this, despite constant evidence being discovered to the contrary. Or they will argue that “we know” that there were no advanced civilizations in North America, despite Sage Wall itself. Such arguments tend to be self-re-enforcing.

I do know that we do not, currently, have the ability to build with megaliths … at least, not so easily that we consider them our first choice in building material. We might make a monument or a gravestone, but we wouldn’t attempt to build an entire house or city out of megaliths. The effort would just not be worth it. This suggests that the ancients may have had ways that were easier than our current methods.

It is worth noting that there is a well-established oral tradition of giants living in North America. There have also been giant skeletons discovered. In Peru, meanwhile, there is the tradition of the Viracochas, bearded, godlike culture-bringers. No, I’m not suggesting aliens. I do think we should take a closer look at the worldwide oral traditions of apocalypses, floods, gods, and giants, and that we should pay attention to myths that suggest that civilizations were “advanced” right from the beginning. If you want to dig into this more than you already have (and if you are reading this, I assume you already have!), please feel free to look at my page The Research Behind the Books for a suggested reading list.

Embedded YouTube Video about Sage Wall