Walks on the wild(ish) side
Alpine arctic tundra to lowland bog, UVM's Natural Areas preserve distinct corners of the Vermont landscape. Hit their trails with notebook in hand and an expert by your side,
and you'll come away with more than a nice walk in the woods.
photography by Shayne Lynn ’93
See more UVM Natural Areas photography by Shayne Lynn ’93 at shaynelynn.com/clients/uvm.
Colchester Bog, October 10
As Ian Worley steps out from a yellow shade of fall trees and onto the boardwalk at Colchester Bog, I’m thinking about shinrin-yoku. In Japan, a relaxing stroll in the woods has been given this name; it means “forest-air bathing.” There, medical researchers have recently shown that breathing the volatile compounds released by trees lowers blood pressure, increases saliva, improves glucose levels in diabetic patients, and reduces depression in just a few hours. A forest, it turns out, is the original aromatherapy.
So, while Worley, director of UVM’s Environmental Program and my guide here at the bog, starts to walk out the worn planks, I press my nose against the rutted bark of a black gum tree and sniff. No new sense of well-being rises. But the tree’s leaves, ferociously scarlet at my feet, are pleasing, as is the knowledge that Worley just passed along: this is one of the few spots in Vermont I can see a black gum. A southern species, it likely migrated here during a warmer period more than four thousand years ago and now remains, a bog-edge relic.
Most pleasing, though, is the knowledge that this peculiar 175-acre peatland on the shore of Malletts Bay—a rare mix of acidic bog and freshwater marsh, home to insectivorous sundews and endangered orchids—is protected as a UVM Natural Area. For more than three decades, numerous classes and researchers have come here to look for strange plants and to dig down through the peat.
On April 20, 1974, when the University of Vermont’s Board of Trustees resolved that Colchester Bog and nine other parcels of University-owned land be designated as Natural Areas they certainly weren’t thinking of shinrin-yoku. But they did recognize that many scientific discoveries happen only in forests and rivers and bogs—and that, for students, many lessons are best uncovered beyond the walls of a classroom.
The trustees wrote that owning these ten natural areas (now nine; Four Brothers Islands was transferred to the Nature Conservancy in 1981) provided departments across the University with “outdoor laboratories” and that “these areas contain unique biological communities and physical environments vital to scientific research.” They knew, it seems, that, like the unexplored compounds wafting from leaf to human lung, much of nature remains unknown.
As I stride to catch up with Worley, the boardwalk’s pontoon-floated sections, built by UVM students as a service-learning project, quake gently on top of a mat of sphagnum moss and sedge, covered with stunted trees. The plants, in turn, float on a pool of still water. Below this living blanket, and at the bog’s edge, Worley tells me, dead moss has been piling up since near the end of the last ice age, unable to decompose.
“Colchester Bog is a huge library of information about the Champlain Valley. That’s why it’s so important to leave it in a natural state,” he says. He speaks of how graduate students have cored the depths of the peat looking for evidence of Vermont’s great 1927 flood and for changing rates of evolution in jumping spiders. He speaks of how undergraduates come here to sit on the observation deck, to sketch the parts of a flower and discuss the way this lakeside bog formed while the adjacent Winooski River dumped tons of sand in an ever-shifting delta.
Is it too much to say that where we stand, a soggy peninsula five miles from Burlington, surrounded by the bronze and red flare-out of plants getting ready for winter, is as much a part of UVM as the brick and redstone of University Row?
“We find more and more values for our natural areas through time,” Worley says, reaching the end of the boardwalk. “As we get better at reading the fine-tuned history of the planet, shifts in the continental plates and magnetic particles from the atmosphere can be read in different layers of peat,” he says. “And surely people will make new discoveries here, if we treat this place with care.” Maybe someone will even find an unexpected benefit from black gum trees.
Mount Mansfield, March 3
I’m following Taylor Severns ’08, and six other students up a snow-filled chute, kicking steps past stubby spruce trees. “This is the most extreme thing I’ve ever done,” she says as ice crystals and sunlight sift across her jacket. Far below, the Stowe Mountain Resort ski lift drones like a misplaced lawn mower. Above, scoured drifts trace the ridge to the top of Mount Mansfield’s “chin,” the state’s highest point. We’re traveling through UVM’s most prominent natural area, four hundred acres across the sprawling roof of Vermont.
Compared to the travails of Edmund Hillary on Everest, this gondola-assisted trek is mild. And even compared to most winter days here, this twenty-degree afternoon is balmy. But Severns is onto something. This is an extreme place, part of the northern Appalachian mountain range, where thousands of storm tracks converge, bringing the worst weather in the world. It’s no accident that Mount Washington—sometimes visible from where we stand—has the highest wind speeds ever recorded, 231 miles per hour.
“New England’s alpine ecosystems are extremely rugged and extremely fragile,” says Rick Paradis, these students’ instructor in Comparative Mountain Systems Natural History and Conservation, and, since 1985, manager of UVM’s Natural Areas.
Reaching the Mansfield summit, we gnaw cold sandwiches and watch off-trail snowboarders rip down an impossibly steep gully—while Paradis describes a tiny plant, Lapland diapensia, hidden under snow. Diapensia serves as a symbol of the paradoxical nature of this mountaintop: tough and tender. A true arctic plant, it has persisted here since the last glaciers retreated, a geographic opposite to the black gum. The only places diapensia still exists in Vermont are a few patches on Camel’s Hump and sheltered pockets in 250 acres of alpine tundra under our snowshoes.
Diapensia grows in a low cushion to resist the tearing power of winter, using tight, thick leaves to endure ice, hurricane-strength blasts, thin soil, and limited available water. It’s a 10,000-year survivor. So Paradis is not worried about the plants getting too cold. He’s worried about boots. Over 40,000 visitors follow the Long Trail across the summit each year, and when they stray from the path the extremely slow-growing plants face a crushing threat that can take decades to heal.
“What are you guys studying?” a backcountry skier asks our group as he comes up the Sunset Ridge Trail. “You guys!” Paradis says with a laugh.
“As much as I like to think it’s all about the ecology here on the ridge—it’s more about culture,” Paradis says. “It’s a grand experiment. How can we use these places and also protect them? Can ornithologists and skiers get along? We have large ski areas and a major telecommunications interest,” he says pointing to the series of hoar-frosted radio and TV towers that poke up from the Mansfield “forehead” on the other end of the swooping ridge. “And we have Bicknell’s thrush, mountain sandwort, and other sensitive creatures and plants that live here.”
He describes a summertime summit caretaker program run by the Green Mountain Club that, with support from UVM’s Natural Areas Center, puts rangers on the top of Mansfield and other peaks in the state to talk with hikers about the delicate natural communities underfoot. It’s one example of the point of this class and of the natural areas program in general: to give students an understanding of land protection, habitat restoration, visitor management, and ecotourism—in places where this work really happens.
Back down in the parking lot, we peer up at two cranes poised over a four-star hotel under construction. Skiers pour out of the gondola house like helmeted subway commuters. Rick Paradis looks around and points to the mountaintop UVM has owned since 1859. “You might think that this kind of development is the biggest risk to the alpine zone. But, really, this new development is quite compact and well-managed,” he says, “I think the biggest challenges for conservation here are the more subtle problems of acid rain and climate change.”
Molly Bog, May 14
From an airplane, Molly Bog looks like an eye staring out of the earth, its open water center surrounded by an oval of floating moss and then a wider ring of spruce and tamarack trees. From the ground, the bog gives off a faintly sour smell as it squishes underfoot, and, as I look down between my rubber boots, young sphagnum glows as green as Gatorade.
“Don’t step there,” says Nick Gotelli with a wry smile, “you could fall through and become one of those bog men.”
Gotelli, professor of biology, has brought me here, to this secretive thirty-five acres north of Stowe, not to look for unlucky creatures that might be pickled beneath the stagnant water, but to see pitcher plants growing on top of the bog mat. Almost a decade ago, he marked two hundred of these carnivorous plants with plastic flags and comes back every year to see how many have survived. Today, he and his undergraduate assistant, Jonathan Mejia ’09, are taking stock of which, of 125 or so that remain, have put up a flower bud. They’re not finding any and Gotelli wonders if this dry spring means a no-flower year for these long-lived plants.
“Hey, here’s one,” Mejia shouts, smiling down into one clump of tubular leaves. He points to a small purple knob rising from the center. Gotelli marks its location on a hand-drawn map.
“This is the most pristine of the UVM Natural Areas and one of the least disturbed bogs in Vermont,” he says, explaining why visitors are usually not allowed here, “but all these sites are victims of larger-scale processes.” Like rainwater deposition of excess nitrogen from industrial agriculture. This airborne fertilizer can be tracked in the closed-water system of a bog, and Gotelli’s research, recently highlighted in the journals Science and Nature, shows it’s likely to cause the extinction of pitcher plants in the next century—and perhaps the elimination of many bogs.
And bogs are not just the anchorhold of weirdly elegant fly-eating plants. They’re part of a global network of peatlands that, while only a few percent of the land area, “sequester thirty percent of terrestrial carbon,” Gotelli says. Rates of climate change may be dramatically affected by how much of this carbon is released from peat into the atmosphere.
As Nick Gotelli steps delicately over clumps of wine-red pitcher plants, I begin to see one of the conundrums of conservation: protection of many natural areas proceeds by a thousand local efforts—like the estate gift to the Vermont Bird and Botanical Clubs that allowed the purchase of Molly Bog and transfer to UVM in 1962—but their fate is a collective one controlled by human changes to the chemistry of rain and snow, and subtle changes to the invisible layer of air that surrounds the planet.
East Woods, June 6
Some problems are not subtle. “You walk into the woods here and the first thing you see is trash that somebody dropped; the second thing you see is dog poop; the third thing is a bunch of weeds, a bunch of non-native exotics,” says Liz Thompson, G’83, as she heads into East Woods, forty acres tucked between Swift Street and I-189 in South Burlington. With the timing of a bad movie, a dachshund, round as a balloon, waddles up the path, breathing hard. My heart sinks. This is a natural area?
But Thompson—an instructor in UVM’s plant biology department and co-author of Wetland, Woodland, Wildland, the definitive guide to Vermont’s natural communities—must like this place for a reason.
And as we stroll into the woods, I begin to see why. Invasive buckthorn and candy bar wrappers give way to the soft shade of white pines and the deeper green of hemlock. I can still hear trucks braking on Shelburne Road, but the burbling of Potash Brook, clear and musical in a pebbly ravine below, can be heard too. We scramble down to the water, which I know is federally listed as “impaired” because of upstream sediment and pollution. Still, in a shaft of morning sunlight, it looks inviting and we stand for a quiet moment watching insect larvae going to and fro in their tiny world.
Thompson and her fellow instructor in Botany 381, Cathy Paris, have brought students here for a decade. “East Woods is a relatively intact piece of forest,” she says. “It’s small, but it’s big enough to be a bit of a buffer.” Against invasive species she means. “It’s really nice to have a patch of woods in Burlington that doesn’t have the nasty garlic mustard we see on the bike path.”
Thompson points out what she calls a “micro-community,” a grouping of a few basswood, sugar maple, and ash trees that signal richer soils. Downstream, we stop to peer into a jack-in-the-pulpit; it looks like a champagne glass with a wave-shaped leaf folded over its top. “And here’s a sedge, Carex pedunculata, that not many people would care about,” she says, “but it’s another indicator of enrichment.”
Overhead there are big hemlocks and a flock of yellow-rumped warblers flits from one to the next. Thompson points to several standing dead trees, “good for woodpeckers.” She’s seen deer move through here and flying squirrels. “I wonder if Indiana bats are nesting in any of these trees,” she says, poking a large hunk of pine bark. “It’s not original forest; this was all pasture once. It’s secondary growth, but that’s okay. It’s recovered through human disturbance and it’s functioning pretty well.”
The great conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.” And for the cheerful walkers here who have no sense of loss when they see invasive Norway maples, the dog owners who can’t believe their Fido is contributing to closed beaches, and the drivers zooming by who can’t imagine that this woodland fragment once was traveled by catamounts—Leopold’s dismay still holds. But almost the opposite lesson may also apply to East Woods: it takes an ecological education like the one Thompson softly offers, to see hidden pockets of biological integrity in a less-than-majestic natural area, to see how, working together, land heals.
(for UVM staff)