Monongahela National Forest

Monongahela National Forest blankets the high Allegheny Mountains of eastern West Virginia -- more than 900,000 acres of rugged, grown-back forest that holds Spruce Knob (4,863 ft), the highest point in the state. Up on its wind-scoured plateaus you'll find something that feels wildly out of place in the mid-Atlantic: bogs, heath barrens, and one-sided "flag" spruce more at home in Canada, most famously across the Dolly Sods Wilderness. Cool twist: parts of Dolly Sods were a live artillery range in World War II, and unexploded shells still turn up now and then -- so up there, you stay on the trail.

The place

Monongahela National Forest rolls across the high Allegheny Mountains of eastern West Virginia -- roughly 1.7 million acres inside its proclamation boundary, of which a little over 900,000 acres are actual public forest, scattered across ten counties. This is the high, wet, cool corner of the mid-Atlantic: the crest wrings the weather out of passing storms and grows a landscape that feels far more like New England or eastern Canada than the South -- all red spruce, cranberry bogs, and windswept heath. It's rugged, second-growth country, logged to the ground a century ago and grown back wild, and it holds the highest ground in West Virginia along with some of the most beloved climbing, hiking, and backcountry in the whole eastern half of the country.

History

The Monongahela was born out of ruin. By the early 1900s the great red-spruce and hardwood forests of these mountains had been almost completely cut over, and the bare, burned-over slopes were washing their soil into the rivers. Under the Weeks Act of 1911 -- the law that let the government buy up worn-out eastern land and grow public forests back -- the first tracts here were purchased around 1915, and President Wilson formally proclaimed the Monongahela National Forest on April 28, 1920. A century on, the forest that grew back is the payoff: what was once a near-moonscape of stumps is now more than 900,000 acres of woods, with a few pockets of old growth (like Gaudineer) that the loggers somehow missed.

Wildlife & plants

Black bears -- West Virginia's state animal -- are the forest's signature resident, at home in this big block of Appalachian woods alongside white-tailed deer, wild turkey, and bobcats. Up in the cool high country you can find snowshoe hare near the southern edge of their range, plus a couple of rare specialties: the Cheat Mountain salamander, found only in West Virginia's high Alleghenies and mostly within this forest, and the Virginia (West Virginia) northern flying squirrel, which was once listed as endangered and has since recovered and been delisted. Fishers, trapped out long ago, were reintroduced and roam the woods again. The cold, tumbling streams are native brook-trout water -- the state fish -- and the forest layers up into red spruce, rhododendron and mountain laurel thickets, and blueberry-and-huckleberry heath up high.

Notable features

The crown of the forest is Spruce Knob, at 4,863 feet the highest point in West Virginia, topped by a stone observation tower and ringed by wind-flagged, one-sided spruce. Not far off stand Seneca Rocks, a dramatic blade of Tuscarora quartzite that's one of the premier rock-climbing crags in the East -- both protected inside the Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area. Then there's Dolly Sods Wilderness, a high, open plateau of heath barrens and sphagnum bogs, and the Cranberry Glades, a boreal-type bog where boardwalks carry you past carnivorous sundews and northern plants stranded far south of home. The forest is the headwaters of six major river systems -- the Monongahela, Potomac, Greenbrier, Elk, Tygart, and Gauley -- including celebrated high-country tributaries like Shavers Fork of the Cheat, the Williams, and the Cranberry, and the Highland Scenic Highway carries you across the high country with the long views laid out.

Cool to know

• Dolly Sods gets its name from the Dahle family -- German immigrant homesteaders (the name got Americanized to "Dolly") who grazed livestock on the high mountain meadows, which locals call "sods."
• During World War II the Dolly Sods high country was a live-fire artillery and mortar training range, the West Virginia Maneuver Area. Crews later cleared it, but unexploded shells still turn up now and then -- which is exactly why the rule up there is to stay on the trail.
• Much of the forest feels like it belongs a thousand miles north. The cold, wet high plateaus grow red spruce, cranberry bogs, and heath more at home in Canada -- living leftovers from the last Ice Age that hung on up in the cool heights.
• The one-sided "flag" spruce on Dolly Sods and Spruce Knob aren't a species -- they're ordinary red spruce sculpted by the relentless prevailing west wind, which kills the branches on the windward side so the surviving limbs all stream off to the east like a frozen banner.
• The forest wraps around some of the quietest airspace in the country. The National Radio Quiet Zone -- a huge federally protected bubble where radio noise is restricted to shield the Green Bank radio telescope in Pocahontas County (on land surrounded by the forest, not a forest unit itself) -- blankets much of this highland country.
• The whole place is basically a comeback story: a century ago these mountains were logged bare and burning, and nearly everything you see today is second-growth forest that regrew after the land was bought up and protected in the 1910s and '20s.