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)

WV Monongahela National Forest: Forest Road 75

FR 75

Forest Road 75 cuts across the high plateau north-south through the Dolly Sods Wilderness area and acts as a transect line that accesses a range of wetland types, forests types, and heath glades. All the popular trails through the Sods connect directly or via connector trails to this road but the trailheads on this day were very busy. I chose instead to avoid the high traffic areas and simply pulled off here and there to explore, taking a few short trails or by bushwhacking in. I used my Purple Lizard map for the Dolly Sods/Seneca Rocks area to find all those cool places most people miss or skip. 

Autumn Meadowhawk

The wetland complex that is the Dolly Sods Wilderness contains exceptional ecological treasures from moss and cotton grass bogs to beaver meadows to vast heathland swamps. But because they are high altitude at 4,000 feet or higher, these places are also highly sensitive to things like air pollution and warming. Numerous research sites are sprinkled throughout the wilderness area that collect data on how much pollution these wetlands are absorbing and more importantly, how very little it takes to alter the functionality of the wetlands - or even kill them off.  It is a wild but extremely fragile landscape. 

   

Beaver lodge and pond

The mystery of this place, however, is its ability to withstand change and recover from the trouncing human activities have inflicted upon it. How does something so wild and wet and lush claim once to be am artillery range or to have suffered a complete deforestation of old growth red Spruce forests?  How does a place so water-logged and sloggy hold  memory of fires so intense that sods were incinerated to dust? 

Garter Snake and Frog-Supper

This ability to withstand sometimes catastrophic change is the beauty and the beast of the Central Appalachian Highlands. It seems the harder we tried to destroy it the harder it embraces the rebound. I had to giggle a little when reading reviews on AllTrails about the various trails that spider-web across the highlands. "God-awful bloody mud!" "What idiot decided this place was good to hike in?" "Everything is wet! Water everywhere?!" Seems like a few hikers could not embrace the literal suck.

A grass bald with Red Spruce glade ringed with heath layers

Narrowleaf Bottle Gentian 

At the trailhead to the North Forest Loop Trail I parked in the shade of a Hemlock and Spruce transition woods and walked the road a bit before plunging down the trail. As I walked a group of very vocal Red Squirrels, screaming and chucking, came blasting to the edge of the woods and scattered in an explosion of fur and noise. My heart jumped into my throat as a big Fisher appeared, dark and thick and growling as chased a Red Squirrel into the open  road but when it saw me standing feet from it, it careened off into the shadows. The squirrel shot one way, fisher the other.

Stag-horn Clubmoss

Once on the loop trail I found the little Stag-Horn Clubmoss almost everywhere up to the very edges of a beautiful grass bald. Lycopods were once the dominate plant family in these ancient landscapes from 425 million years ago through the Carboniferous Age and its remains along with ferns formed the bulk of the organic carbons locked up in West Virginia's coalbeds. Some Lycopod species grew up to 100 feet tall while other species grew at every layer in the forest column.  The little Stag-Horn forest that lined the trail hosted a bunch of beautiful Smooth-tailed Hover Flies that sat warming in the patches of sun at the edge. Such beautiful little flies but my camera phone was inadequate for the capture. 

Inside a Red Spruce glade

Also missed by my phone camera was a very exciting sighting of a Yellow-Banded Bumble Bee, a rare sight anymore in the Mid-Atlantic except for these high altitude wetland meadows. I stood and watched two males bob and weave among the low Cranberry mat that grew tight against the edge of a Spruce Glade. Again, I wished I had brought my better camera and lens, both of which still need repair ($$).

Iconic Yellow Birch waiting for its next fan photos

Yellow Birch

Of course I had to stop to pay my respects to one of FR 75's most iconic trees, an old gangly Yellow Birch that grew up in a sunny glade now surrounded by young Spruce and Pine. Thanks to social media, this old soul has become something of a Dolly Sods celebrity for selfies and family portraits. I waited in line (!) to get my chance to photograph this great tree without people posing for the cameras. It was hugged on, patted, even kissed. A family was thrilled to have found it and told me that after the Sycamore on Hadrian's Wall was attacked by vandals (sawed down) they have made it their mission to find and photograph themselves with as many of the "great trees of our region" as they could this year. They named a dozen or more Champion and iconic trees in western PA, Virginia, and West Virginia they'd located each weekend since mid-summer. 

Tawny Cotton Grass

I stopped to explore several other wetlands and was so happy to add Smooth Greensnake to my list but again, unable to photograph it with my phone before it slithered away into the underbrush that encircled a beautiful Cotton Grass meadow. Old logging roads and a walk out to a hawk watch station led me to a field of red-berried  Mountain Ash and past some very impressive Allegheny Mound Builder ant mounds, where the ants were busy provisioning for winter.

Agueweed

American Mountain Ash

Witch-Hazel 

After hours and hours exploring along FR75 the intersection with the steep and winding FR19 had been reached, and so my exit for now from Dolly Sods. My ears popped as my truck angled down and down for the valley below with a stop to examine an outcrop of shale and the small shale barrens plant community that surrounded it. But it was not a safe place to be parked for long on a hairpin curve!

Notes:

Purple Lizard Maps are my favorite maps to use in the Mid-Atlantic and if you had one you'd know why. I used the Dolly Sods and Seneca Rocks map on this trip. Beautiful map!

WV Monongahela National Forest: Dolly Sods and Bear Rocks Preserve

 

Red Spruce and Blueberry 

The Appalachian Highlands region covers portions of nine Eastern U.S. States and is described as one of the wildest and most biodiverse mountain regions in the world. Embedded within the Appalachian Highlands region are some really interesting places that, like most of the Appalachian Mountain range are unique chapters in the ongoing story of industrial exploitation and ecological recovery of the last two centuries. I'm on my annual pilgrimage into the Pleistocene and have landed in the Monoghela National Forest to see what stories I can dig up. Yes, I have my Woolly Mammoth, Woolsey, in my backpack. 

Sandstone cliffs of the Allegheny Front 

The Bear Rocks Preserve is part of a 17,500 acre conservation area that contains a high altitude heathland, wetlands, and remnant Red Spruce forest known as the Dolly (Dahle) Sods. It is a remarkable sub-alpine landscape, part of a larger complex defined by cold winters, a very short growing season, and plant communities that resemble the upper boreal of Canada. To stand at the top of the sandstone block cliffs, weathered by water and ice, one stands on the edge of the Allegheny Front facing east looking into the Ridge and Valley Province. The Allegheny Front was one of the most serious impediments to westward expansion of the 1700s but once the fortress-like wall of the mountain was breached by roads through and over the steep water and wind gaps, settlers did come but they did not stay long. 

Frost-nipped fern frond

 

Red Spruce

Ancient Red Spruce and Hemlosk forests once covered the vast heathlands but industrial logging operations eliminated these highland forests in the late 1800s and early 1900s leaving tons of volatile slash behind. Lightening strike fires and careless fires started with railroad equipment ignited the mountain tops and several major wildfires burned hot and uncontrolled  with a most historic wildfire-firestorm consuming most of the 650-acre Dolly Sods area in 1930. With repeated burns that spanned three decades, this scenic area now afire with the red blaze of blueberry heath, was nothing more than a high altitude desert. At an altitude of 4,800 feet, Dolly Sods was biologically dead. 

Water-worn sandstone 

"A River Ran Through It" sculpted stone

To add insult to injury, the area was used during WWII as an artillery testing ground and firing range. The expansive desert-like plains exploded with shelling from 1943 to 1944 as mountain artillery divisions practiced for warfare in the Italian Alps. It is hard to imagine a place so beautiful now, laid to waste after fires and being fired upon. What makes it even more remarkable is that it even became a conservation area at all, given that private landowners that included the Western Maryland Railroad and Virginia Electric and Power refused to sell the land for decades even as the Monongahela National Forest was enveloping the mountains all around in protected land. It wasn't until 1993 that the Dolly Sods came under conservation management with large purchases made by the Nature Conservancy and  designations made during the Obama Administration under the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009.  

Flagged tree shaped by ice and wind

Flag trees at 4,800'

While exposed rock and vast plains of low growing heath plants mark the present character of the Dolly Sods plateau now, it is even harder to imagine a dense old-growth forest composed of ancient conifers that averaged ten to twelve feet in diameter.  These relic forests existed here for millions of years before the logging industry destroyed them in less than fifty. These conifer communities with understories of  fern and dense, peaty soils tens of feet thick contained untold numbers of peat community species including boreal bird species, salamanders, mammals, and insects. These relic communities originated during the Pleistocene Epoch when glaciers covered much of the Northeast and bitterly cold climates prevailed southward into Georgia in the Appalachian Mountains though no ice sheets extended beyond northeastern Pennsylvania into these parts.

The Pleistocene woodlands of the ancient Dolly Sods were rainforests, dependent upon ample rain and snowfall and thick blankets of fog that still blanket the mountains in fall and spring, sometimes for days on end. The forested plateau now devoid of any of its  rich peat beds due to 20th century fires, held vast amounts of water that ran beneath the cover of peat and humus as hidden rivers into the western basin of the present Canaan Valley. What we see today across this vast low plain of heath is a tiny fraction of the ecological wealth that once existed here. Whether we will live long enough to see those old Spruce forests return is unknown but efforts are underway by both the National Forest Service and the West Virginia Nature Conservancy to re-establish Red Spruce forests across the Dolly Sods conservation area and throughout historic high altitude and valley glade sites of the Monongahela. 

Notes:

West Virginia Nature Conservancy https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/places-we-protect/west-virginia-dolly-sods-and-canaan-valley/

Forensics Guide for Unexploded Ordinance in Dolly Sods, Amy Richmond Aylor (2008) https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3608&context=etd

Monongahela National Forest  (NFS) https://www.fs.usda.gov/mnf