NJ Fort Mott State Park and An Announcement

An Announcement:

Hi Friends and Readers of Natural Mid-Atlantic,

I'll be migrating content over to a new Substack blog site as The Land Journals before Christmas 2025.

The benefit of this move is to bring back the subscription option that sadly the Blogger platform did away with. I lost over 200 subscribers when they did that and it's the #1 question I get regarding this blog, "How do I subscribe?" Well, currently you can't. But soon you can!

Additionally on Substack I have the ability to prevent AI from scraping my content. Since AI first started invading the blogosphere a year ago, this blog has been scraped several times to train AI technology. I'm not okay with that. Substack has the security features that protect my work. 

I already maintain a Substack site for my work in pilgrimage studies, Uphill Road  and I'm familiar with how the platform works, impressed with ways to build community around the subject and with others who are doing similar work. 

Natural Mid-Atlantic will continue on Blogger for a time, but I will no longer be adding content after Christmas 2025. After that it will simply exist. Please join me over on Substack where you can subscribe (!!) and where I'm making all content free, just as it is now. (But support is gratefully accepted!) 

A big change, necessary and exciting! 

Now, a post for last week's hike - 

Fort Mott State Park, November 1, 2025

Fort Mott on the Delaware River

I love a good environmental history adventure and this outing to Fort Mott State Park with my Drexel student grandson was a good one.  One of three defensive forts built on the Delaware River to protect Philadelphia in the early 1900s (Spanish-American War & WWI) Fort Mott's big guns were concealed behind an earthen berm, invisible from any enemy ships venturing upstream. If an enemy appeared, they were raised on elevator lifts to commence fire. Though the fort never fired its guns in defense, it did conduct frequent practice firings which "sounded like the end of the world." 
 

5-inch rifled battery gun

On this beautiful autumn day Koda and I roamed the grounds of the fort and walked along the ferry pier to do a little birding and botanizing. We maybe covering a relaxing two miles. When we entered the fort and clambered up the parapets, I realized we were being served up a heaping helping of  The World Without Us (Alan Weisman, 2008). 

Gun emplacement - Battery Harker

Nature was having a great time dismantling, dissolving, and occupying the place. A rickety range tower served as a hunting perch for a Peregrine Falcon. A berm-and-ditch defensive hill wore a crown of Eastern deciduous trees in their finest fall colors. Sassafras, Tulip Poplar, Hickory, and Oak saplings sprouted from the concrete floors of the gun emplacements. It was a jungle down there! 

With the concrete in decay, reacting with rainfall and air to form calcareous rubble in some places, I noted Cliff Ferns growing happily on the calcium-carbonate leached walls. One species, Blunt-lobed Woodsia, is more commonly found on natural limestone-bearing cliffs throughout the Appalachian Mountain range but here it was growing along ledges of mortared bricks on the banks of the Delaware. Calthemite formations including stalactites and wavy, watery sheets of flowstone oozed from the ceilings. We found bat droppings and the nests of this past summer's Barn Swallows in the dark recesses behind iron-barred gates. 

Gunnery Crew 

It was fun to think about the source stone that provided the concrete mixtures used to make the thirty-feet thick walls. Limestone, dolostone, and other carbonate rock types started out as the skeletal remains of small marine organisms. As rainwater and groundwater leaches through soil and bedrock overlying cave systems, carbonic acid forms to dissolve carbonate rock made up of all that ancient marine life to create the cool formations we see underground. And here we were seeing the same process play out on a human-built landscape made of concrete. 

Ferry Pier to Delaware

With all this carbonate running down the walls and permeating the ground, only plants that can grow in calcium-rich environments grow well here. We noted Hop Hornbeam and Red Cedar saplings and little Viburnum shrubs growing along the contact zone between concrete bunkers and the grassy soil-built berm. Little Bluestem, a native prairie grass, grew in the wheel grooves of a gun pit. Ebony Spleenwort, Cliff Ferns, and the delicate stems and leaves of a Wild Columbine clung to white stained ledges. 

Peace Magazine and rail tunnel

Barn Swallow nests 

Every available niche of abandoned and neglected wall, ditch, and berm was full of life. Mosses and liverworts adorned sunny alcoves, blanketing corners and edges with drapes of green and grey. I was reminded of my trips to the UK where gravestones become havens for diverse species of moss and lichens. There are field guides written by cemetery botanists and bryologists that make graveyards incredible places to do natural history.  Why not here, too? I think this old fort could offer its own field guide for plants, mosses, lichens, and animals that now occupy the place. 

Cliff Fern growing in calcareous concrete 

 I wondered if we were to abandon this place altogether - goodbye state park, visitors, people in general - how long would it take for nature to completely reclaim this ground? Starting with the algae that thrives in humid, damp places the entire structure becomes a terrarium of sorts from the inside out -  though I'm sure park staff do the occasional cleaning in the more accessible rooms. 

Ammo transfer hoist and green algae

Though fall migration for birds, butterflies, and dragonflies is coming to an end we observed plenty of aerial life that hovered, hunted, and flitted throughout the park. A dilapidated range tower where spotters once scanned the broad waters of the Delaware for enemy ships and called in firing ranges for the gunnery crews served as a perch for a loud Peregrine Falcon. The falcon launched several forays over the water hunting for ducks and other shorebirds and returned to the iron rails above us to scan again.  

Range Tower / Peregrine perch

Peregrine Falcon

Fort Mott reminds me of several of the old military installations I've visited on the Atlantic Coast, each reverting to a semi-wild state as it crumbles, rusts, and decays. The massive Cape May Bunker perched out on its wild Atlantic beach resembles a rocky outcrop where Cormorants and Gulls gather in their colonies. Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, is occupied by nesting owls and hibernating bats. Harbor Seals haul out on the flanks of the old battery at Fort Hancock on wild shores of Sandy Hook, New Jersey. These are some of the most fascinating places that prove nature is nothing if patient and persistent (even unrelenting) if given the opportunity.

Journal pages

Notes:

Check out my new YouTube Channel The Land Journals that now accompanies my Substack blog (of the same name) featuring the how-to's of natural journaling and natural history/conservation art.

WV Monongahela National Forest: Cowpasture Trail Loop 8 mi.

Belden Lane writes in Backpacking with the Saints, that in the Celtic tradition of wilderness wandering "I venture out so I can find my way back in again." And, as I left the Cranberry Glades Botanical Area and found the Cowpasture Trailhead nearby, that's just how I felt taking those first steps on an 8-mile loop that would bring me right back here. The trail would skirt the valley-bound complex of bogs, cross three feeder streams, and climb a bit on to the mountain slopes that ringed the wetlands. 

As I started I noted that a few cars had arrived at the parking area so I hurried to get out on the trail before a crowd formed. A crowd for me nowadays is like three people. Soon Amos and I were deep into a Hemlock woods making our way along a rise of land with the bog a distance out. The trail followed the trace of an old road that seemed too wide for an old wagon road. As we hiked deeper into the valley I couldn't shake the feeling that a crowd of people would suddenly materialize. 

AllTrails map of the Cowpasture Trail Loop, MNF # 253

Eventually we came out onto a broad open meadow of Goldenrod. I discovered two species new to me - Flat Top and Mountain Decumbent Goldenrod - and spent a few extra minutes trying to get some good pictures and sketches. Then I saw a sign and at the same time felt that crowd of people even though nobody was there. The open meadow, according to the smallish interpretive sign, was the site of the  Mill Point Federal Prison. I write more about what I discovered there in my latest Uphill Road post.  The wide trail we'd hiked in on was part of the long prisoner-built access road to the prison yards. 

Site of Mill Point Federal Prison (1938 - 1960)

In addition to holding common criminals, draft resistors, and communist party members, the prison prided itself on rehabilitating men through skills training and access to a good education. The prison had no walls or fences as it was surrounded by the huge bog valley and anyone who tried to escape quickly found themselves thrashing through miles of cold water and deep, cold, sucking peatlands. The natural history of the place, however, piqued the curiosity of three inmates who found their love for botany and teaching.

"There were also three naturalists who used their time at the prison camp to document the flora, fauna and wildlife of the area. Worth Randle, Al Simon and Albert Huber were all at the camp around the same time and found a way to “escape” to the cranberry bogs where they did their research. Randle wrote to West Virginia University professor Maurice Brooks about his findings and Brooks encouraged him to create a plant listing of his findings. “So basically, the WVU professor enticed him to escape from prison and do these lists,” Springston said. Of course, the men were soon discovered, but instead of getting punished, they were allowed to continue their research and eventually allowed to lead tours of the area. " - Suzanne Stewart, The Pocahontas Times, Sept 24, 2025

Decumbent Goldenrod

Bushy Bluestem 

After spending some time in the open meadow I continued on the trail and crossed the first bridge, newly replaced and arched high over a stream. The bog was so thick with Cotton Grass it looked like snow. There have been a few very cold mornings here but no hard frosts yet so there was still quite a bit of flowering and green across the valley. I could imagine the interest those inmate-naturalists had taken in doing surveys and tours of this place. Because of their efforts we have a solid baseline of species found here in the 1930s that botanists and ecologists can compare to today to show change in this ecosystem over time. 

Cotton Grass 

I scrambled up a steep hill where the trail climbed a mountain slope. Immense oaks grew along what surely had been an old wagon road and my steps crunched a heavy crop of acorns underfoot. We frightened several deer and a small flock of turkey foraging along the road up ahead. White Snakeroot was still in bloom and it frosted the sides of the path in white.

A newer bridge over Charles Creek

I came upon an older man taking a break from his mountain biking. He was sitting under one of the old oaks catching his breath from having pushed his bike up that steep grade. He was glad for the company and was happy to tell me all about the area as he was born and raised and worked in one of the mountain valley towns a few miles away. He taught in a special ed program in the local public high school for nearly 40 years. He knew the history of the prison, the naturalist-prisoners' story, and about one of the prisoners I was very interested to learn had been held there, civil rights activist and draft resistor James Lawson. He even participated in some of the civil rights events that happened in West Virginia in the 1960s as a college student and remains active in civil rights issues "especially now - something I can never retire from. We always need to stay vigilant and active to protect people." Amen.

White Snakeroot

White Snakeroot continued to line the footpath. This plant was a one of the most utilized panacea plants in the Cherokee and Shawnee forest pharmacy. It was used to treat just about anything related to the lower gut and reproductive organs and used also as a fever reducer. This time of year in early autumn would have been when people collected the entire plant from root to flowerheads to process into a range of medicinal products from tea blends, root powders, ground flower and tender stem poultices. It was even used to treat ailments suffered by livestock and horses when Indian peoples began to farm the valleys in the style of livestock dependent settlers who overran the area in the mid-1700s. 

Red Spruce summit and restoration site

When I was able to get a full view of the valley I saw how the ridge lines were topped with Red Spruce and nearby one viewpoint I could see a replanting effort site mentioned by our project leader the day before. We worked in another site but she circled the place on the map where I might see their work from twenty years ago. The replanted restoration site today is plainly visible from a viewpoint that overlooks an old prison-era orchard slope. 

Flat-topped Goldenrod

Shrubby St Johnswort

The restoration of Red Spruce throughout the Southern Appalachian Highlands is an ongoing multi-partner effort to try and right a century-long series of wrongs that people have inflicted upon these mountainous landscapes. Those wrongs include fifty years of overharvesting, poor forestry practices, massive fires, coal-fired powerplant emissions, vehicle emissions, and introduced disease outbreaks. The restoration efforts are making progress but as our project leader stated, "Our great-grandchildren may ... may ... experience the great Red Spruce forests as they were before the logging era took the first of many swings at this species."

Work site sketches - Project RESTORE

Restoration is both a theme in my hiking as well as in my job. I seem to have found a way to have the idea of restoration cross two areas of my life kind of seamlessly.  I work professionally as an ecological restorationist and when possible I look for places that could use my skills in forest restoration as a volunteer. I've done a few "work-camping" partner projects with USFWS in the great Moose Bog in northern Vermont, on a restoration project with a Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve Grasslands Project in Kansas, and with a survey for American Chestnut in Shenandoah National Park. 

Alder and Reindeer Moss

I find the idea of restoration hopeful and encouraging, especially when I hike into places where nature itself has healed some great destruction and I have observed while hiking some really astounding reintroductions of wildlife that were only possible because vital habitat has been under careful restoration stewardship. I was even an early volunteer for the Red Wolf Recovery Project on the coast of South Carolina and when I return to the southern states and learn that the Red Wolf survives in some places because of that work, I myself feel restored. 

After many miles of hiking on the edge of the Cranberry Glades bog system, we popped out of the woods on to an unpaved forest road that took us on flat land back a mile to where the truck (and lunch) awaited. Looking into the hemlock and spruce woods, speckled in sunlight and shadow, the Glades felt mysterious even seductive. I wanted to plunge right back in. We passed the trailhead sign for the Cranberry Glades Botanical Area where I had walked earlier that day and then came upon the Cowpasture Trail sign where we had started our loop hike.  Amos refused to smile for the camera, looking instead through the woods towards the truck where his water dish and food bowl and comfy camp bed were. It had his rapt attention. 

Let's eat lunch!

The maps of the Cranberry Wilderness Trail system as provided by the USFS are pretty poor. They look like someone made them with a bunch of potato stamps! So I had to dig around the interwebs to find something better and came across this nice USGS-based topo map made by a user on the sub-Reddit "Wilderness Backpacker."  I share both maps here for comparison. I ended up using the excellent trail guide in Notes below, a downloaded map through AllTrails (there is NO signal here at all), and had an okay paper map with me that I picked up at the closed-due-to-government-shutdown Cranberry Glades Visitor Center. It was the last one in the rack and I returned it when I was done no worse for wear.

Sub-Reddit User Map:

USFS Map:

Notes:

I discovered so many great trails with this book that I dog-eared it early on. I hope to return to see more that the Mon has to offer for hikers. The Cowpasture Trail Loop in the Cranberry Glades Wilderness area is a favorite of the authors:  "If you can only hike one trail on a visit to the Mon, this is the one."

Allen de Hart and Bruce Sundquist (9th Ed.) West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest: 40 Spectacular Hikes in the Allegheny Mountains. 

WV Monongahela National Forest: Cranberry Glades Botanical Area

Cranberry Glades Botanical Area, Oct 7, 2025

Cell phones don't work here. Most electromagnetic devices won't work here, honestly. We're on the edge of the Quiet Zone, a huge chunk of the Monongahela National Forest that is radio silent (or tries to be) in order to protect the Green Bank Radio-Telescope and a nearby intelligence agency facility. But even without the National Radio Quiet Zone this high, cold, wet bowl valley of bogs and surrounded by isolated mountains seemed disconnected from just about everything anyway. 

Cranberry Glades Botanical Area

Access to the Cranberry Glades Botanical Area is via a boardwalk loop trail which was breathtakingly beautiful. I was escorted by a pair of American Woodcock for a short way as they walked along the shadow of the boardwalk investigating the mucky leaf litter for tasty worms and bugs. They seemed completely unfazed by my presence and allowed me to watch their bob-walking away into the alder thicket. Beaver activity was all around one section of the boardwalk which Amos the Coonhound found enticing as he checked out their wet paw prints on the wood and recently mounded mud piles for scent marking.  I watched a small school of Appalachian Pearl Dace swim against a gentle current as the boardwalk bridged a small creek. Several big Eastern rivers claim this valley as headwaters and I wondered how the stream's waters would travel by which river to the sea. 

With the government shut-down and the Cranberry Glades Visitor Center closed, there were no people on the boardwalk the entire two hours I sat out there sketching and studying the ecosystem.  Green Darner Dragonflies were droning around the bog catching flying insects on the wing as they migrated south to the Gulf of Mexico. Red Spruce laden with small red cones were hopping with birds, also feeding heavily to fuel their migration journey. I had a particularly close encounter with a Blackpoll Warbler who was also totally okay with my presence. He picked every tiny bug off one spruce bough then moved a step higher to do the same, spiraling around the tree so as not to miss a single morsel. 

Boardwalk at CGBA

Speaking of morsels, as I stood sketching the Woodcock I kept seeing what I thought were snowflakes, but it was too warm! I turned around and saw this mass of Woolly Alder Aphids clinging to a crook in an Alder limb. Every time the cold breeze powered through a few of them would get peeled off and float around on their feathery plumes, thus creating the "snow." They seemed to wave goodbye as I ventured further down the boardwalk. 

Woolly Alder Aphid

I had the time that day to do the long day hike around the bog system on the Cowpasture Trail but I couldn't tear myself away from this wonderful place. I'll save that experience for another post, however. In the meantime I was bathing in the silence and serenity of the place, able to detect without distraction, the smallest movements of animals probing for food - a salamander on the muddy edge of the stream, tiny wood warblers sneaking through the trees. The quiet wind through the Cotton Grass made the entire valley bob and wave with little white moppet tops. 

Though the boardwalk is only a mile long, I went around again. This time I noticed the blaze of Winter Berry fruits that I'd missed while watching the Woodcocks. I loved how the wild Cranberry ran amok here, there, everywhere on the floor of the bog and Northern Pitcher Plants poked up through it. 

Winter Berry, Ilex verticillata

Partridge Berry, Mitchella repens 

Cold-hardy plants included the prostrate woody vine, Partridge Berry.  Found as far north as the boreal forests of Ontario and Quebec surrounding the great northern Hudson Bay, this tough plant can endure the coldest of winters. Close together pairs of white waxy flowers blossom even as the last of the winter's snow and ice are still on the ground, luring cold hardy bumble bees to some of the earliest nectar and pollen resources of the year. Once pollinated the two seed forming ovaries merge to create a double berry. 

Ancient Red Spruce

Along the boardwalk entry path - as I finally decided to leave and start the second hike of the day - I encountered a cold pocket of old spruce forest carpeted with moss and draped with lichens. The ancient Red Spruce were relics of an earlier time and survivors of the logging boom that stripped much of West Virginia's spruce forests off the mountain ridges and slopes. Protected by the deep peat soils and boulder-strewn terrane these trees occupied a throwback to the Pleistocene, a cold, harsh landscape so harsh and inhospitable to people. For a decade now there have been efforts to restore the Red Spruce forest across the Allegheny mountain range - the main reason for my trip to the Monongahela this year as a volunteer tree planter on a project site not far from here.  

* Sketches were started on site and finished when I returned home. They did not look like this when I was walking off the boardwalk, very rough indeed! I do take reference photographs to use later and I  format my pages on site and usually get as far as layering colored pencil and watercolors on to preliminary sketches. When the light changes I move. No, I did not see a Wooly Mammoth but it being my favorite extinct animal I can do his portrait pretty well anywhere, especially in relic Pleistocene habitats like these excellent high bogs and cold forests in the Mon.

Notes:

Cranberry Glades Botanical Area, Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia (USFS)

West Virginia's Monongahela National Forest: 40 Spectacular Hikes in the Allegheny Mountains (2022)

PA-AT Hike #12: Whiskey Springs to Little Dogwood Run

PA-AT Hike #12: Whiskey Springs to Little Dogwood Run O&B 4.5 miles

Rocky Ridge connects to White Rocks like this

This is a tough section of my local AT walk sections and one I've been putting off just because as a day hike, it can be exhausting. But I needed to get away from work and school and take a day, so why not? I plotted a lollipop route using the adjoining PA Game Lands trail system to make it more interesting. Never mind that weird little stabbing headache I drove up with, by the time Amos and I set up the hill, it had faded thanks to a triple dose of Tylenol. 

Push-Pops

Long ago when I was thru-hiking PA with a cousin, this section earned the name The Push Pops that reminded him of the fun summer ice cream treat that emerges from a smooth cardboard tube with a little pressure from the bottom. The whole of Rocky Ridge to its connection with the popular White Rocks Ridge a few miles northeast seems pushed up and out of a slot in the ridge making these angular, almost eruptive formations. Normally I would have walked up to the biggest ones and explored but for some reason I was winded, out of breath, and decided to just sit and admire them. 

Seed capsules erupting on Burnweed

I was feeling a little light-headed, even dizzy, but still wasn't connecting how I was feeling with the latest spike in Covid cases happening at the college where I teach night classes. I had four students out with Covid last week and never thought I'd be next - until this hike. By the time the AT intersected with the old charcoal wagon road for the nearby Boiling Springs (Carlisle) Iron Furnace (1760) I was two miles in and feeling rough. I took the old wagon road up into the rugged woods of the Game Lands and followed it across a knob of quartzite and sandstone. Here we met a gorgeous Black Rat Snake who seemed just as curious about us as we were of him. A real beauty! 

Black Rat Snake

I had planned a short bushwack to connect the two trails and was checking an app that uses LiDAR to identify old industrial sites nearby when a stunning Red Tailed Hawk flew past at eye level at twenty yards. As I  looked up from the phone, the hawk angled its bright iron-red tail with its single black band towards me and swooped around in a half circle.  It's that time of year when hawks are spilling out of the northern woods along the Appalachians to ride the mountain ridge currents south. This beautiful hawk arced upwards into the light breeze and pivoted above the trees towards the south. Safe travels, hawk!  

AT along top of Rocky Ridge

AT near bottom at Little Dogwood Run

Old charcoal wagon road (PA Game Lands) 

Charcoal pit! 

As we hiked off-trail between the old road and the AT we encountered two charcoal pits worth exploring. These broad flat areas were used to stack and burn oak and chestnut logs to make charcoal fuel for the furnace nearby and were often connected by faint traces of roads that fed into main haul roads. They show up clearly on LiDAR as pock-marks along sides of hills. I explored one of the pits and found a fine patch of Burnweed growing there, thriving even in this sudden onset drought at the end of summer when not much else is growing. Burnweed has its tough little cylindrical flowers held tight with no flashy petals to observe but it is a nectar haven for late season butterflies and beetles who can probe deeply for a rich reward. They grow in places where fire (like charcoal burning) has made soils poor for most other plants, but they thrive here,fixing nitrogen and stabilizing ash and char with their deep tap roots.  

CalTopo LiDAR layer 

We stopped for a break at the intersection of the AT and the old charcoal wagon road to complete the lollipop section of this hike. I studied the Lidar app some more and realized just how many charcoal pits were in this area - dozens and dozens. At one time this entire forest was reduced to charcoal to feed the hungry iron furnace at Boiling Springs, which is still in good form at a small park in town (minus its wood outbuildings and sheds). The forest we hiked through today was the second or third version of woodland after the furnace ceased operations in the early 1800s. 

 Virginia Pine

When I stood up from our break, Amos was eager to get going but my head was spinning. He nearly pulled me over (but not on purpose) as I tried to steady myself upright, knowing  now that I was coming down with something unpleasant. Trying to steady my steps with hiking pole and tree holding, I made my way back up and over the Rocky Ridge section of the AT until we came to the long steep way back down to Whiskey Springs. I hated that I felt so bad and wanted to get off the trail as quickly as I could. It was a beautiful day with lots going on, but my body was not having it. 

Heading home

Notes:

CalTopo App - well worth having on your phone if you love exploring landscape history and getting off the beaten trail. 

The Boiling Springs Furnace (Carlisle Furnace) is not far from this section of the AT and later the AT will pass right by it.