PA Gallitzin State Forest - Bog Path Trail

The Bog Path Trail is part of the John P. Saylor Trail (JST) system in Gallitzin State Forest and has been on  my list of wetfoot muck walks to do this year. In early July I had my chance to walk it and wanted to make another loop with the JST. It was hot and very exposed, however, and my big black dog Amos did not care for any of it, so we made a quick four-mile out-and-back hike instead. A few of the board walk sections were slightly flooded since there has been so much rain and the main trail was a bit mucky, too, but all the better for a good muck and for cooling off in the shady edges.

The Great Bog 

Bogs form when old lakes, ponds, or wetland fill in with Sphagnum Moss. In older bogs the moss can often can be several feet thick! I pushed my hiking pole into the moss mat at several locations and found the moss to be about three feet before touching the bottom of this shallow wetland. There was very little open water except for a stream inflow and lots of open sky. Where the Sphagnum was thick enough to create little spongy islands, some trees, Spruce, Alder, Poplar, and White Birch grew.

 

A bog is mostly dead plant material trapped beneath a cover of living Sphagnum. This creates an oxygen-poor, highly acidic, nutrient poor environment. With such difficult growing conditions that reach extremes of cold and hot seasons during the year, few plant species thrive in the open here so plant biodiversity can be low depending on how far from the wooded margin they can grow. The plants that do survive in a bog, however, are super interesting and right away I came across one of my favorites. 

Leaves adapted to catch insects - Northern Purple Pitcher Plant

A very sweet treat - Northern Purple Pitcher Plant 

Northern Purple Pitcher Plants (Surracenia purpurea) appeared as soon as we stepped out of the hemlock woods into the sun. I'd hit the bloom period just right, happy to see all those weird flowers poking up like War-Of-the-Worlds spaceships high above mounds of highly adapted, insect-catching leaves. It was prime time for insect capture and for every pitcher leaf I peered into there were two or three insects captured in enzyme-laced water inside. How do Pitcher Plants avoid capturing their own pollinators like Bumblebees? The flower grows high above the pitcher leaves, often by a foot or two (!), and the pollen and nectar of the flower is incredibly sweet smelling and tasty, super attractive to Bumblebees. The scent of the pitcher leaf water,  however, emits an odor not so attractive to bees but very attractive instead to flies, beetles, and ants. 

Tawny Cottongrass

As we continued across board walk sections out onto the open bog, Tawny Cottongrass (Eriophorum virginicum) lifted its spidery flowers above the thick moss blanket. Come fall these flowers will look like wads of cotton held aloft by their spiky bracts. Neither a relative of the cotton plant nor a grass, the cottongrass is a sedge that grows only on deep, old peatland. Seeing Cottongrass is a sure sign you've found an old bog. 

Dewdrop, Rubus dalibarda

Margins in the cool shade

To keep Amos from overheating I brought him out of the sun into the cool, moist shade of the woods edges quite a few time and explored the margins of the bog. Here I found Dewdrop (Rubus dalibarda) growing in profusion. I'd hoped to see this showy little groundcover at least once this year and here it was growing throughout the hemlock margins where ever we ducked into the shade. Dewdrop loves bogs but not too much sun, so encountering it here was a real treat. In PA it is only found along the Allegheny Front and only around but not in the open bog. 

Feeder stream

We crossed a feeder stream where Amos wanted to grab a sip of water but he soon discovered it tastes pretty bad, quite acidic from tannins and peat. He drank all of his water bottle and half of mine in his little collapsible bowl but nothing seemed to help with the heat except to keep ducking into the cool muddy margins of Hemlock and Rush. I knew it was time to start heading back to the truck after a few miles in. It is no fun being a big black dog during a Pennsylvania heat wave in an open bog!

Cool mud beneath Rush beds

We found an old section of boardwalk that helped us cross a small stream back into the shady woods. The old wooden planks were cool on Amos' paws. As he gets older, now eight years old, he - like me has grown less and less tolerant of heat. I sometimes worry about this and today was a worry day. It was brutally hot with high humidity and I didn't want him (or me) to get sick out here especially since he'd gone through most of the three liters of water I was carrying. We got back to the truck where I keep a five gallon jerry can of cold water and he drank his fill while I started the engine and the air conditioner. 

Back to the woods

Back at our campsite at Blue Knob State Park high on the mountain (where it was at least ten degrees cooler than in the bog) Amos climbed atop his camping bed in the shade and quickly zonked out. We kept the next day's hike to the cool mountain summit trails. We'll be back when the JST is cooler to enjoy another muck hike before the year is over. Well done, old boy. 

Yellow trail (4 miles) out-and-back

Notes:

Flora of Pennsylvania - Dewdrop  https://www.paenflowered.org/apgii/rosales/rosaceae/rubus/rubus-dalibarda

U.S. Forest Service - Pitcher Plant https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/sarracenia_purpurae.shtml

Gallitzin State Forest (maps) https://www.pa.gov/agencies/dcnr/recreation/where-to-go/state-forests/find-a-forest/gallitzin

PA Buzzard Swamp Wildlife Management Area - Allegheny National Forest

Buzzard Swamp Wildlife Management Area is a partnership project area shared by the Pennsylvania Game Commission and the Allegheny National Forest. We visited this vast wetland system and hiked an out-and-back on its main loop trail for about 2.5 miles. Pleasantly surprised by the beauty and the richness of wildlife here, we could have stayed the whole day but decided to make a half-day of it due to the heat and biting flies and my big black dog being uncomfortable with both. 

We took our time and admired every view, pond, meadow, and lake and were pretty much awed by it all. With over 1,200 acres of protected wetlands, a chain of ponds and lakes with large wetland marshes is partly managed by humans with small culvert and sluice gates but the real water managers were the beavers and muskrats. We found evidence of both everywhere we went from beaver dams and beaver lodges to muskrat cattail huts along a main gravel road. There were deer, so many birds, and plenty of scat on the path - coyote, mink, raccoon, even fisher. 

Beaver dam against the road

Butterflies and dragonflies were everywhere in the road, most feeding on salts found in scat piles or preying upon the flies that hung around the scat. Monarchs were common thanks to vast meadows of Milkweed, Indian Paintbrush, and other host plants. The beaver-made wetlands are critical habitat for two Clubtail Dragonfly species of concern in Pennsylvania. We stopped at Pond #5 (out of 15) for a water and snack break and watched families of Barn Swallow swoop out of the culvert we were sitting over, We could hear the young begging from the nests inside the culvert. 

An Osprey adult flew with her two newly-fledged young who were just earning their wings over the largest lake behind us. A juvenile Broad-winged Hawk flashed through a spruce woods that ringed with Red Maple and grassy marsh. We had just experienced an adult Broad-winged Hawk wheel at eye-level over the truck on the rough road up from the Clarion River, so seeing a juvenile within the hour was a treat.

Milkweed

Spruce opening

This is the kind of place that whispers to you when you hike through. The wind in the meadows creates a kind of sigh that is perfectly punctuated by Red-winged Blackbirds. You can almost hear the flap of Tiger Swallowtail Butterflies as they cruise close to your ears. Green Frogs and Red-eyed Vireo compete to be the loudest until the Marsh Wren shows up. To not stand still and listen to the chorus of meadow insects and the whirrrr of dragonflies over the ponds is a mistake. Take the time to stop and do nothing else but listen. 

Looking out across this vast basin of ponds and marshes I felt somewhat reassured that everything will be alright. Migrating waterfowl will begin arriving by September and Atlantic Flyway will again be full of birds moving steadily south. There was something tremendously hopeful in how this wetland complex was so full - absolutely crammed - with animals, birds, bugs, reptiles, and amphibians. We came across a Snapping Turtle nest that had survived predation and showed the prints of tiny turtles fanning out from the nest to the edge of a pond. The cycles of life large and small wound round and round, full of promise. 

While on our camping break in the Allegheny National Forest I had learned about the passing of Joanna Macy, American Buddhist and great lover of all things wild. I'll write more about Macy in my companion blog Uphill Road over on Substack later this week, but here in the middle of the great wet meadows I had the sense that this was a place I could find her if I needed her, a traveling poet spirit on the breeze in "widening circles" through the watery landscape not unlike and nor far from her Western New York childhood home. 

“To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe—to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it—is a wonder beyond words."

- Joann Macy, World as Lover, World as Self (1991)

Notes:

Allegheny National Forest trail map for Buzzard Swamp WMA https://www.alleghenysite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Buzzard-Swamp-Trail.pdf

PA Shawnee State Park: Disappearing Allegheny Oak Glades

On a very hot, humid day in the Allegheny Front region of Pennsylvania I decided a change of plans was needed to spare my not-so-heat-tolerant coonhound from another day in the sun-exposed bogs of the Gallitzin State Forest. We retreated instead to the nearby oak forests of Shawnee State Park, a few minutes east. I had just listened to the latest 1A podcast episode on Sam Bloch's new book Shade  so of course I had to make some plant surveys! I chose a closed canopy 2 mile-long forested trail within the park but what I found there - besides being drastically cooler - was a real treat for me (and Amos).

Bloch describes how tree shade affects humans and animals biologically as a multi-layered canopy  lowers air temperature on a hot day by as much as twenty degrees F. The heart rate slows down and the body's cooling mechanisms relax. Shady forests can even generate their own ground to canopy breezes which help with evaporative cooling.  As we climbed up the slope to the broad knoll on top, the shade quality went from humid and deep to breezy and cool above. Amos even had a little fancy prance at just about 80 F' compared to his sluggish walk in the open bogs at 95 F' yesterday. 

Chestnut Oak, Quercus montana

As we hiked along the dry shady oak ridge of weathered sandstone, the cooling effect of the great old oaks was intoxicating. Acres of massive Chestnut and Chinquapin Oak, all of them hundreds of years old with their great out-sweeping limbs shaded  patchy below-canopy grasslands spread across the forest floor like a vast carpet. But, unlike what I'm used to seeing in our acidic woods at home, there were no heath plants, no blueberry or huckleberry, no laurel or rhododendron understory, so I knew the soil composition was very different. I scuffed around in the duff which was very thin over light sandy soils that barely covered the sandstone bluff.  The deeper we went down this old growth path the more I suspected that a unique kind of habitat, part woodland, part grassland, was unfolding in front of us. 

Chinquapin Oak, Quercus muehlenbergii 

Aprons of grasses and small forbs grew in the distinctly circular canopy shadow beneath each of the giants. Beyond the aprons were small Sassafras, Shagbark Hickory, larger Cherry and Sweet Birch saplings all forming a ring of transition woodland around each of the giant oaks. Seeing the repeating pattern of open shaded grass glades beneath each of the old trees, mostly made up of native Poverty Oatgrass and Little Bluestem, I was sure I'd wandered into an Appalachian Oak Glade, one of Pennsylvania's most vulnerable Allegheny Mountain habitats. I stepped carefully into one of the large green patches beneath a Chinquapin Oak to survey what grew there. 

Indian Tobacco

Blue-Eyed Grass

Grass Pink

Poverty Oatgrass

Pennsylvania Sedge

The vulnerability of the Allegheny Oak Glad is concerned with invasive non-native plants and fire/grazing suppression. These little patches are little prairie oak savannas in miniature and they occupy mid-elevation southern facing outcrops with poor soils underlaid with calcium-bearing sandstone. Valued by indigenous people who lived in the Allegheny/Appalachian Valley and Ridge region these little oak glades attracted big game like White tailed Deer, Elk, and Bison. Controlled fire was used to sweep upslope to the summits to deter all but the toughest trees like Oak, Pitch Pine, and Chestnut while favoring the deep-rooted grasses and forbs that herbivores love. 

Oak Glade in transition

As settlement and cultivation overtook the fertile valleys and Shawnee peoples were forcibly moved off their ancestral homelands, farmers continued to use these open oak glades for summer livestock pasture. As Crosby (1986) described, the Neo-Europeans and their non-native livestock swarmed over the Alleghenies, "grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chirping, snarling, and buzzing in a self-replicating and world-altering avalanche." This activity bought the oak glade habitats a little more time until another invasion took hold. From DCNR flyers of non-native invasive plants, these were some of the most abundant invasives I noted in the little aprons of Oak Glade grasslands:

 

Now that controlled fire and intensive livestock grazing is all but gone over this sandstone knoll (being a protected landscape within the state park) the little patches of prairie beneath the old growth oaks are threatened with a number of invaders. Encroaching on the little grassland habitats were hundreds if not thousands of small sprigs of Japanese Barberry as far as the eye could see. Interspersed among these were Winter Creeper, an invasive vine that prefers open woodland, and a few dense stands of the prolific Common Velvet Grass, a common, aggressive European pasture grass that has made its way upslope from farms beyond the park. 

So what? Isn't this just a little niche habitat doomed anyway to environmental change and not worth all the worry? To the everyday hiker a little disappearing oak glade may even be invisible, therefore not a concern at all as one goes on about her hike. But this is for me an example of living in Aldo Leopold's "world of wounds" where my love for ecological communities and environmental history can leave me feeling sad. Standing along the mile-wide knoll with all its many patches of oak glade grasslands tucked neatly into the cool, cast shadows of the giant tree canopies overhead, I saw the shade for what it provided this wild, increasingly warming world with its own special sanctuary from the sun - a place born of harsh, hot environments after all and that offers us the possibility of shady resilience against the onslaught of heat waves. Amos loved this slow paced walk among the old trees so much that he gave a few of them a loud HELLLOOOOO! 

Notes:

Alfred W. Crosby. 1986. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900 - 1900. Cambridge University Press. 

Common Velvet Grass  https://elibrary.dcnr.pa.gov/GetDocument?docId=3643509&DocName=Velvetgrass.pdf

Winter Creeper https://elibrary.dcnr.pa.gov/GetDocument?docId=1738762&DocName=winter%20creeper.pdf

Asian and European Barberry https://elibrary.dcnr.pa.gov/GetDocument?docId=3549861&DocName=Barberry.pdf

Shawnee Trail, Shawnee State Park, PA