NorsePlay Investigates: The Mogollon Troll!

While on my way to this year's Southwest Frith Moot, I decided to take a detour to go to my Map Of Midgard's stickpin for The Mogollon Troll and have a proactive investigative mythologist looksee both for the monster that makes this central Arizona highland rim its home, and a hidden cave potentially filled with legendary giant-kin treasures!

[Map Of Midgard rollover for The Mogollon Troll stickpin from the Jötnar data layer!]

Known as "The Mogollon Monster", given his physical description in the screencap above, if we lens him through the Norse Lore this totally makes him a troll, so I've used that recontextualization & worldview to place him on my map as The Mogollon Troll.

As I drove up, it started to rain. At first intermittently, then for wetter spates. While I'd read online the unpaved road was an unchallenging washboard, the reality was somewhat rougher than that, took slower going, and had logging truck traffic that if mistimed around some corners might've proved disastrous. What I want to say about all that is it'll take you longer that your GPS thinks, and if the rain was worse, lowered visibility would play hard against you, and the mud could very well keep you if it got that wet. And taking a loop on the way out, there was a spot of inclined rocky gapped road that required some superjudicious light bouldering over for the sporty NorsePlay-mobile that only has 3¼" ground clearance, which really might've stranded me and damaged the car. You are warned.

From the digital maps and looking at the now archived Mogollon Troll website's map (above), the stickpin I'd placed in the most dense & central area of sightings looked reachable by car and right next to the rim (with 80 sightings on the rim alone), but it wasn't. And I'd thought that maybe from the online maps' scale that people in Northern Payson might be able to see a large cryptid looming on the rim of the canyon looking down at them, but being up here you notice that "metro" Payson is much farther in the distance, so that visibility isn't really naked eye possible:

[Troll's POV shot: View looking down at Payson in the further distance.]

Making the turnoff into Barbershop Canyon you instead reach a campsite that blocks you off about a half-mile away from the stickpin:

[From the Rim Road, looking into the campsite, hot lava NorsePlay-mobile trough the trees.]

Getting out with my trusty Byrna Ǫndbítr in the event of direct troll/bear/brigand encounters, I started walking to the mappoint, being careful to note where the car was as it disappeared in the distance.

Objective Observations:

Once you drive into the area, the trees pretty much swallow your lines of sight, the overhead light reduces by at least a third, and you realize that anything could be out here and have its run of the place, troll or otherwise. By contrast, the trees thinned out somewhat on the uphill walk to the stickpin, but this had to do with the increase of rock in the landscape. Insect & wind noise aside, it's really quiet, so short of a supernatural sound deadening ability, you'd hear a smaller jötnar on the approach.

Heading NNW, there was a stratified rock area that one could see likening to an arena for seating larger beings:

And just to the N of that was an oddly honeycombed wall that might remind one of cubbies or mailboxes:

[perhaps a vote casting area, or purposed for games, or an altar of sorts?]

Here is the actual stickpin site looking S after just passing it:



This would be the geographic nexus of troll activity, according to the above map. The oddly suggestive rock formations aside (and hey, I'm no geologist, so let me know about the above), I saw no trollsign, no tröllrúnar, no suspiciously gnawed-on human/deer remains, or otherwise. The rim and its adjacent areas, however, are very broad and very large, so there's nothing to argue that they weren't out elsewhere for the day/week/month or below ground under my very feet. I could only spare an hour or so out there as I had SFM to get to before nightfall.

[a troll kid "door" at the top left?]

Subjective Observations:

While looking out there, there's definite feelings of hesitation, isolation, and an otherly aliveness imparted within that landscape. Maybe this is a reaction from my long stretches of inner city daily urban living (which arguably has its own sense of "otherly aliveness"), but the idea that there's something/s more specifically out there holds to that area.

In the Norse Lore, there's alot of trolls that get caught by daylight and petrified by the sun, and I also spotted what could be interpreted as petrified troll parts:

[a young troll's head? Look at the face outline looking up.]

[the left hemisphere of a troll's brain?]

And the idea that this is one troll is unlikely given the far-ranging spread of numerous sightings (plus petrified troll parts?), so odds are this is instead a tangle of trolls living out in our remote Arizona utgard (and not just in this area).

Other Thoughts:

In a far larger sense while out there, the importance of civilization is greatly reduced, and we realize there's far more wild nature than tenuous human occupation. Given that insight, I had the realization that sometimes the middle of nowhere is also the center of everywhere. This also gives one a grateful sense of the importance of Thor's role in keeping the creatures from the outlands at bay so we can feel more secure about our same carved out areas tenuous human occupation, plus learn from his defensive example and brave forays into those outlands.

[wearing my six million dollar Bionic Beowulf NorsePlay shirt during this investigation as a troll warning!]

Personally, trolls or no trolls, there was a deep sense of satisfaction in using the Map Of Midgard to engage with the world and actually go investigate something, and I hope once all my maps are printed you will too. If after reading all this you go troll hunting on the rim and see one, do let us know in the comments below!

[The Mogollon Troll's GPS points: 

34.41361, -111.21013]

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Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants at age seven. Since then he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the Map of Midgard project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay. If you have employment/opportunities in investigative mythology,  field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.