page_title: Dolly Sods Wilderness
section_title: Flora
hierarchical_section_title: Dolly Sods Wilderness / Ecology / Flora
caption_attribution_description: English: Upper Red Creek area of Dolly Sods Wilderness.
context_page_description: The Dolly Sods Wilderness — originally simply Dolly Sods — is a U.S. Wilderness Area in the Allegheny Mountains of eastern West Virginia, USA, 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 excavated 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".
context_section_description: Dolly Sods is well known for its open expanses of sphagnum bog, heath shrubs and scattered and stunted red spruce — all creating impressions of areas much farther north. Many plant communities are indeed similar to those of sea-level eastern Canada. But the ecosystems within the Sods are remarkably varied. In recent decades, the many stages of ecologic succession throughout the Sods have made the region one of enduring interest to botanists.
caption: Upper Red Creek in Dolly Sods
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