page_title: Peters Mountain Wilderness
section_title: Natural History
hierarchical_section_title: Peters Mountain Wilderness / Natural History
caption_attribution_description: English: Flower in Peters Mountain Wilderness
context_page_description: The Peters Mountain Wilderness is an area protected by act of Congress to maintain its present, natural condition. As part of the wilderness system. it helps to preserve a variety of natural life forms and contributes to a diversity of plant and animal gene pools. Over half of the ecosystems in the United States exist within designated wilderness.
  The ridge of Peters Mountain offers excellent vantage points overlooking the hills of West Virginia, and the area includes interesting bogs and mountain outcrops. The deep forests are occupied by the northern saw whet owl and many species of warblers. The mountain is home of the rare Peters Mountain Mallow.
  The area is part of the Mountain Lake Wilderness Cluster.
context_section_description: Vegetation in the wilderness is primarily upland oak with yellow poplar, red oak, and hickory with at least three tracts of old growth forest.  There are numerous sandstone outcroppings along the crest of the mountain and a number of high mountain bogs on Pine Swamp Ridge. Peters Mountain Mallow, one of the rarest plants in the United States, is unique to the mountain.  It is protected in a 398-acre preserve purchased by the Nature Conservancy of Virginia that is located just outside of the wilderness area.
  Peters Mountain mallow was discovered in 1927 by botanists who found 50 specimens.  The plant was placed on the endangered species list in 1986 when a survey crew found only four specimens.  In order to sprout, dormant seeds require fire to crack open and let water in.  Cores from nearby trees showed that no fires had burned in the area for two decades. After a small blaze was lit in 1992 a few mallows sprouted. and later 500 seedlings were found.
  In 1849 John James Audubon and John Bachman found a fisher on Peters Mountain, just south of Peterstown, West Virginia.  The fisher is a secretive, dark-colored mammal that once ranged as far south as the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina.  The fisher is no longer found in this area, but it has been introduced in parts of West Virginia and could return to the wild habitat provided by the Peters Mountain Wilderness.
  Stony Creek contains the colorful candy darter, an imperiled fish found in only a few tributaries of the New River.
  A bog at the head of Pine Branch Swamp near the crest of Peters Mountain contains cinnamon fern, sphagnum moss and sundew.  Loggers last cut the area in the 1920s and 1930s leaving a 10-acre stand of old-growth hemlocks.
caption: Wild Geranium in Peters Mountain Wilderness
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