Spring Pond Bog whets the imagination

A rare, primeval experience

By Tim Rowland

When the last of the glaciers retreated from North America, they left behind the lakes, cliffs, gorges and watercourses familiar to Adirondack adventurists. 

North of Tupper Lake, they created something different—a 500-acre highland depression with no way for water to flow in or out. Nor was there any groundwater with nutrients. This expanse became something of a biological black hole, where life would have to develop an unconventional bag of tricks to thrive.

None of the traditional Adirondack flora—hemlock, ferns, hobblebush, maple, blueberries—were up to the task. Instead, the spoon-like depression filled with botanical oddballs: plants whose dead branches became storage tanks for surplus water, cold-blooded killers that decorated their doors of death with little welcome mats, flowers that depended on the generosity of others for food.

All these characters are present in the Spring Pond Bog, a peatland preserve that was protected by The Nature Conservancy in the 1970s.

The second largest in the state, the bog is one of the most dramatic and magical spots in the Adirondacks. Yet it is rarely visited. Surrounded by a gated, private hunting club, it’s accessed by obtaining paperwork from The Nature Conservancy to be presented to a gatekeeper. There’s also a lengthy stretch of dirt road leading in, although nothing a passenger car can’t manage in dry seasons.

The property includes fens fed by outside water sources that bring nutrients and allow for a marginally more diverse population of plants. Bogs are watered strictly by “distilled” rainfall.

“If you come out here, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have it to yourself,” TNC preserve stewardship coordinator Kate Berdan said. “It really is a gorgeous place.”

The drive to the bog—much of it over an old railroad bed—is scenic on its own, passing through ponds, woodlands, wetlands and some makeshift hunting camps that are unspeakably picturesque. 

The friendly and helpful gatekeeper told my wife, Beth, and I to keep our eyes peeled for moose. Sure enough, we saw a massive bull with a large rack. He seemed to regard the road as his personal property, and we refrained from arguing the point until he ambled off.

Beyond the trailhead and a small ridge, the path, not quite a mile in length, climbs briefly up an esker deposited by the ice some 12,000 years ago.

A wildlife highway for bear, turkey and deer, the esker is also habitat for the rare spruce grouse. A handsome forest has developed, but in a few hundred feet a boardwalk leads into a different world of sphagnum moss beds, which turns a showy crimson in the fall.

The live part of the plant is bright and cheery, but long strands beneath the bog’s surface are dead. Still, they serve a purpose, storing up to 26 times their weight in water, insurance for the moss against extreme drought. This absorption capability is the basis for bales of peat moss found in garden centers. In fact, Berdan said, there had been a risk at one time that this bog could have been excavated and sold as a soil amendment.

A boardwalk extends over the soggy organic matter flanked by a boreal forest, providing a close-up view of some of the bog’s few, curious inhabitants. Those that have managed to adapt to the lack of nutrients did so with interesting workarounds. The pitcher plant, for example, lures insects into its carp-like mouth with showy red veins. It draw insects in and they become incapacitated in the water in the bottom of the “pitcher.”

To perpetuate their species, bog orchids depend on a symbiotic partnership with fungus because their seeds lack the starches for germination. The chances of the seeds landing where this fungus exists are slim to none, an inconvenience the orchid overcomes through the sheer volume of its seed productions—tens of thousands of them, the consistency of nearly microscopic dust.

In this shallower part of the bog, tamarack and black spruce attempt a beachhead. These small trees appear here and there, their gnarled, twisted countenance resembling an evergreen as might have been envisioned by Dr. Suess. 

When we visited, a hermit thrush sang. About 130 species inhabit these boglands. Before the snow flies (the preserve is closed in winter), birders have reported snow buntings, eagles, owls and jays.

The other plants that can survive here can almost be counted on one hand, mainly heaths including labrador tea, leatherleaf, bog laurel and bog rosemary.

Sitting on a bench listening to the wind in this landscape can be an almost hypnotic experience, but the main attraction is yet to come. The trail traverses a wet forest and dark, pooling waters before the bulk of the bog appears.

“There aren’t many open spaces like this in the Adirondacks that aren’t manmade,” Berdan said. “Every time I come here the colors are different; they change ever so subtly.”

The sphagnum can be lime green, burnt orange, or, in the fall, candy apple red, contrasting with the yellows of the tamaracks and heaths. As we walked to the edge of the bog, it felt like approaching a lake shore, because in a sense that’s exactly what this is—a rainwater-fed lake choked with thousands of years of decaying plant matter. Borings have shown, Berdan said, that we were standing on the edge of a 25-foot cliff, even though what we were viewing looks more like a colorful prairie, mesmerizing, almost alien. 

“This is a landscape not a lot of people have seen,” Berdan said. Belying the tranquility, the bog is working hard sequestering carbon and fighting climate change. Stories here are waiting to be exposed through analysis of submerged pollen and plant matter that has yet to fully decay for lack of oxygen.

“Somewhere under this is history going back thousands of years,” Berdan said.