You climb up to it through ordinary Appalachian hardwood forest, and then the trees change and the world goes strange. Dolly Sods sits on a high, exposed plateau in the Allegheny Mountains, around 4,000 feet, and the plants up there belong a thousand miles to the north - red spruce, sphagnum bog, heath barrens, the kind of sub-arctic landscape you'd expect in Canada, marooned on a ridge in West Virginia. It's a leftover from the Ice Age that the climate up here never let go of.
The wind does the rest. It comes across the open plateau hard and constant from the west, and the flagged spruce show it - trees with branches only on their downwind side, every one of them combed the same direction, like the whole forest is leaning away from something. In between them: open meadows, huckleberry that goes red in fall, boulder fields, and bog you'll sink into if you wander off the path. On a clear day you can see for miles. In fog, which is often, you can see about thirty feet and it feels like the edge of the world.
There's a darker layer under the beauty - it was a military training ground in the Second World War, and the Forest Service still turns up the occasional piece of old ordnance, so you stay on the trails. But mostly it's just one of the most singular places in the East: a piece of the far north hiding in the mid-Atlantic, wind-scoured and quiet and unlike anything around it.
