The Susitna mountain image was made by a digital artist, and Nancy Lash invented its legend

An image of the "Sleeping Lady" mountain, photographed by drone in Canada, 30 km north-west of Anchorage, is gaining popularity online. The story of Mount Susitna is bound up with an Indian legend about a girl who suffered from unhappy love: her beloved did not return from battle, and she had promised to wait for him at the place where they parted, and turned into a mountain. Lovely, isn't it? And what an incredibly realistic silhouette of a woman, for a mere geographical feature. But the trouble is that this remarkable drone photograph is in fact the work of the digital artist Jean-Michel Bihorel, as he himself stated on his page. The story of the girl, for its part, does have genuine folkloric roots, but it has nothing to do with the traditions of the native inhabitants of Alaska: it comes from a work of fiction published in a local periodical in the 1960s, as Nancy Lesh, who invented the story in high school, has reported. The toponym Susitna, however, does genuinely exist, and is connected with the name of the river of the same name