Dolly Sods Wilderness
The Dolly Sods Wilderness is a U.S. Wilderness Area in the Allegheny Mountains of eastern West Virginia and is part of the Monongahela National Forest of the U.S. Forest Service.
Dolly Sods is a rocky, high-altitude plateau with sweeping vistas and lifeforms normally found much farther north in Canada. To the north, the distinctive landscape of "the Sods" is characterized by stunted trees, wind-carved boulders, heath barrens, grassy meadows created in the last century by logging and fires, and sphagnum bogs that are much older. To the south, a dense cove forest occupies the branched canyon incised by the North Fork of Red Creek.
The name derives from an 18th-century German homesteading family, the Dahles, and a local term for an open mountaintop meadow, a "sods".
Geography
Topography
Dolly Sods is the highest plateau east of the Mississippi River with altitudes ranging from at the outlet of Red Creek to at the top of the eastern edge mountain ridge on the Allegheny Front. Much of the high plateau section lies at nearly elevation. Prominent summits within the wilderness are Coal Knob, Breathed Mountain, and Blackbird Knob. The highest point in the immediate area is Mount Porte Crayon. The summit area around Mount Porte Crayon is the largest flat-topped plateau in Eastern North America containing above elevation.Drainage
Dolly Sods is on a ridge crest that forms part of the Eastern Continental Divide. Most of its area is drained by the North Fork of Red Creek, which is a tributary of the Dry Fork River. Via the Dry Fork, Black Fork, Cheat, Monongahela and Ohio rivers, it is part of the Mississippi River watershed. South of Forest Service Route 19 is the adjoining Red Creek–Flatrock–Roaring Plains area, which is drained by the South Fork of Red Creek. Drainage on the east side of the ridge crest flows into the headwaters of the South Branch Potomac River, which is part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.Boundaries
The original Dolly Sods was a mountaintop meadow of about at the southern end of Rohrbaugh Plains, near the present Dolly Sods Picnic Area. The present-day DSW encompasses some of U.S. Forest Service land and is part of a larger area now known as "Dolly Sods". The DSW is bordered by Forest Service Routes 75 and 19 on the east and south sides, respectively.To the northeast, DSW is bordered by the Bear Rocks Preserve, owned by The Nature Conservancy. The surrounding area was recently added to the wilderness and is known as Dolly Sods North. North of Dolly Sods North is an area known as Dobbins Slashings—a sub-arctic bog forming the headwaters of Red Creek on Cabin Mountain. Dobbins Slashings has also been proposed for wilderness preservation. In the Canaan Valley to the west, the DSW is adjoined by the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Almost all of DSW is in the southeast corner of Tucker County with only very small sections extending into Randolph and Grant Counties.
Trails
There are some of hiking trails within the DSW, many situated along the courses of abandoned railroad grades and old logging roads. The premier viewpoint within the wilderness, affording a vista of the entire Red Creek drainage, is at a set of rocky crags known as Lion's Head Rock. It is reached by an almost three-mile climb from the nearest road. The last quarter mile is an eight-foot-wide bench in the side of an otherwise steep slope. Like the cliffs constituting the eastern edge of the DSW at Rohrbaugh Plains, Lion's Head Rock consists of a mixture of sandstone and conglomerate. The Northland Loop Trail is a interpretive trail just south of Red Creek Campground on FS Rt 75 which accesses Alder Run Bog a typical, and much studied, northern bog or southern muskeg.History
Pre-logging
The Dolly Sods area was first encountered by Europeans when Peter Jefferson, Thomas Lewis and others surveyed in 1746 to find the limits of Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron's land grant from the British Crown. The famous Fairfax Line grazes the northern margin of the wilderness near Bear Rocks. This area was generally avoided as too difficult to traverse until the late 19th century. David Hunter Strother wrote an early and somewhat breathless travelogue of the area, published in Harper's Monthly magazine in 1852:In Randolph County, Virginia, is a tract of country containing from seven to nine hundred square miles, entirely uninhabited, and so savage and inaccessible that it has rarely been penetrated even by the most adventurous. The settlers on its borders speak of it with a sort of dread, and regard it as an ill-omened region, filled with bears, panthers, impassable laurel-brakes, and dangerous precipices. Stories are told of hunters having ventured too far, becoming entangled, and perishing in its intricate labyrinths. The desire of daring the unknown dangers of this mysterious region, stimulated a party of gentlemen... to undertake it in June, 1851. They did actually penetrate the country as far as the Falls of the Blackwater, and returned with marvelous accounts of its savage grandeur, and the quantities of game and fish to be found there.
The name Dolly Sods derives from the family name of Johann Dahle, a German immigrant who settled nearby. Such early settlers used the natural open fields on mountainsides known as "sods". Logged out and burned over areas produced additional good grass cover for grazing sheep and cattle. Locals changed the spelling of Dahle to "Dolly," and thus one such area became known as Dolly Sods. The Dahle family eventually moved on, leaving behind only the Americanized version of their name.
Local historian Hu Maxwell described the Dolly Sods area in the Wheeling Intelligencer in 1886: "The top of the mountain is flat, except here and there rugged ridges and huge promontories of rocks rising above the level of the plains, and giving the scene an appearance of distance and mystery that must be witnessed before it can be understood".
Logging era
The area surrounding Dolly Sods was formerly described as the best spruce-hemlock-black cherry forest in the world, with some enormous trees up to in diameter. The huge spruce and hemlock became accessible in 1884 when the West Virginia Central and Pittsburgh Railroad, a predecessor of the Western Maryland Railway, first arrived at nearby Davis from a junction with the B&O Railroad at Piedmont. In 1899, the Parsons Pulp and Lumber Company established a sawmill at Dobbin on the North Branch Potomac River in Grant County. In 1902, a band saw mill was constructed on the main stem of Red Creek. The lumber boom town of Laneville sprang up around it with a population that peaked at over 300 people.Shay locomotives climbed the temporary railroads into the mountains and backcountry logging camps sprang up throughout the Sods. Teams of draft horses dragged the timber to the nearest tracks. When the timber was exhausted in the sector around one camp, the rails were taken up and reused elsewhere. It was into the mill at Laneville that most of the timber of the southern two thirds of the Sods disappeared.The humus covering the ground dried up when the protective tree cover was removed. Sparks from the locomotives, saw mills and logger's warming fires easily ignited this humus layer and the extensive slash—wood too small to be marketable, such as branches and tree crowns—left behind by loggers. Fires repeatedly ravaged the area in the 1910s, scorching everything right down to the underlying rocks. All insects, worms, salamanders, mice and other burrowing forms of life perished. The destruction was extraordinary. The complete clearcut of this ecologically fragile area, followed by extensive wildfires and overgrazing, exacerbated by the ecological stresses of the elevation, have prevented quick regeneration of the forest which has taken decades to recover. The Monongahela National Forest was created in 1915, largely motivated by a desire to mitigate the sort of wholesale destruction that had swept over the Sods. In 1916 most of Dolly Sods was purchased by the federal government. Mineral rights remained in private ownership.
The Laneville mill closed in 1920 after almost all the timber had been cut, and the local population dwindled. The last timber was felled in the Dolly Sods area in 1924. A particularly ferocious fire raged in late July 1930 in the northernmost Red Creek and southernmost Stony River watersheds. This conflagration—known as the Dobbin Slashings Fire—consumed and killed many trees left alone as non-commercial by the loggers. An eerie landscape persisted here for years, with the stumps of these trees perched high upon jumbles of boulders. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps made some modest attempts to remediate the damage to Dolly Sods by re-planting stands of red spruce there.
Army use and cleanup
In 1943-44, as part of the West Virginia Maneuver Area, the U.S. Army used the area as a practice artillery and mortar range and maneuver area before troops were sent to Europe to fight in World War II, with Cabin Mountain and Blackbird Knob serving as designated targets.In 1997, a work crew extensively surveyed trail locations and known campsites for shells. Workers made 32,594 excavations along the trails and discovered and detonated 14 live mortar shells, most along the Fisher Spring Run Trail. All were exploded on site. Two others were inert. They also found numerous railroad spikes, iron tools and horseshoes left over from logging days. Off-trail searches proved to be impossible, so some of the artillery and mortar shells shot into the area likely still remain there.
Threat and recovery
Dolly Sods became popular with recreationalists and conservationists in the mid-1960s at which time political agitation began to set it aside as a preserve. Local farmers also ceased allowing their livestock to graze here at this time.Nevertheless, the area was threatened by at least four potential developments:
- sub-divisions for summer homes on Cabin Mountain,
- as a route for a proposed federal expressway linking Washington, DC with the highlands,
- strip-mining of as many as six coal seams, which was already occurring within of the Sods in the north and
- flooding of a reservoir as part of the proposed Davis Power Project just to the west.
In the 1970s and 1980s, it was not possible to propose Dolly Sods North for wilderness classification as it was all privately owned by the Western Maryland Railway Company and the Virginia Electric and Power Company and was largely outside the proclamation boundary of the MNF. Public acquisition could not go forward as the companies refused to sell. In 1993, however, the Nature Conservancy paid another $6 million to acquire in Dolly Sods North from Quintana Corporation. This land was then donated to the Forest Service. Most recently, the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009 added of Dolly Sods North to the original of the wilderness to make the present total of.