Cranesville Swamp: A Piece of Canada in Maryland
Near Wisp, West Virginia
Hidden in the hills along the Maryland and West Virginia line is a bog that feels like it wandered south from Canada and never left. Cranesville Swamp is a preserve of roughly sixteen hundred acres straddling Garrett County, Maryland, and Preston County, West Virginia, and it is one of the last boreal bogs in the entire southeastern United States. The secret is the shape of the land.
This is what scientists call a frost pocket, a bowl where the surrounding ridges trap cold air and moisture, so frost can settle here in almost any month of the year. That deep chill lets plants and animals of the far north survive thousands of years after the glaciers retreated. Here you find the southernmost stand of tamarack, a conifer that drops its needles in autumn, alongside carnivorous sundews and thick carpets of sphagnum moss.
The Nature Conservancy began protecting the swamp in nineteen sixty, and in October of nineteen sixty four it was named one of the very first National Natural Landmarks in the country. A boardwalk about fifteen hundred feet long lets you walk out over the wettest ground without sinking into the Ice Age.
