The Big Bog: Northern Minnesota's remote, misunderstood landscape by Carol Wallwork

Wild, remote, an ancient soggy landscape made accessible with a thoroughly modern high-tech walkway over the bog

 This is the place of the homesteader's heartbreak, the pitiful cabins sinking back to earth, the sad and rusting plows, the blasted apple trees.  About the Red Lake Nation, and the Anishinabe, where there is no ZIP code and the night crackles with aurora borealis and sometimes automatic weapons fire."

                           -Rober Pinckney, one-time bear hunter now reformed

                             First published in Minnesota Monthly, April 2002

      Rank reeds and lush, slimy water plants sent an odour of decay and a

      heavy miasmatic vapour onto our faces, while a false step plunged us

      more than thigh-deep into the deep, quivering mire, which shook for 

      yards in soft undulations around our feet.  It's tenacious grip plucked at 

      our heels as we walked, and when we sank into it it was as if some

      malignant hand was tugging us down into those obscene depths, so

      grim and purposeful was the clutch in which it held us.

                                                               Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

                                                               Hound of the Baskervilles

                                                             
Conan Doyle’s description of Dartmoor is one of the most evocative ever penned about the Big-Bad-Wolf tendencies of bogs. At the Big Bog Boardwalk near Waskish, Minnesota you may now throw to the wind Doyle's frightful admonitions as you walk over a bog. This mile-long, state-of-the-art metal and plastic boardwalk--mere inches above the bog--lets you discover the changes from a bog’s outer edge into its more hostile interior.  You arrive back at the parking lot dry-footed, only faintly aware of the dark side of quivering mires, and you're now one of the rare few to trek into such an exotic locale, while living to tell the tale.

September
The third week of September 2008 my husband Jim, our long-time friend Brenda and I headed out of Grand Rapids, Minnesota,  to the Big Bog Recreational Area.  We made a delightful pit stop at one of my favorite coffeehouses and health food restaurants, Brewed Awakenings, for veggie quiche, lattes and a  quick perusal of the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s election coverage before gassing up and heading 100 miles northwest, to the largest boreal bog in the lower 48 states, 29 miles south of the Canadian border. 

A sorry mix of scrubby, new-growth forest changed markedly the further north we drove.  Quaking aspen encroached on aging birch groves.  Boggier spots were swathed with tamarack; red and white pine covered the less prevalent high ground.  We passed two of Minnesota’s largest but shallower lakes--Upper Red Lake and Lake Winnibigoshish, in Beltrami County, with 18 people per square mile.

It’s a near house less region, dotted sparsely with small resorts catering to fishing and hunting, and rare remote cabins.  Absence of human settlement lent an odd tincture to our drive, ‘a what’s different about this picture?’                
                                                                                    

Black spruc

The Lay of the Land

This is flat land, otherwise it would be rilled with streams, not supersaturated with bogs. Glacial Lake Agassiz was the largest inland lake to ever exist, stretching from Saskatchewan, Canada to the Dakotas and Minnesota. When an ancient cycle of global warming caused it to recede, it trapped waters in the flat glacial lake bottom, which became this bog, for no inlets supplied fresh water and no outlets allowed drainage.  Only 5% of American wetlands are peatland bogs and they are  largely in northern Minnesota.  Alaska, Canada, Ireland, England, Finland, Russia and parts of Germany also have sizable bogs.  All are in northern boreal forests.

Unlike swamps and coastal marshes, which support a rich variety of wildlife, bogs are a far more hostile environment because they are poor in minerals and low in oxygen, two essential components of all life. This acidic brew is similar to formaldehyde, allowing no bacteria to grow.  Things deteriorates very slowly in a bog.  In 2006 the remains of two Neanderthal men were found in an Irish bog and their fingerprints were still intact. It takes years for simple footprints to fill in enough to disappear.

A limited range of  plants such as the leatherleaf shrub from the heath family, Sphagnum moss, orchids, cranberries, bog rosemary, Labrador tea and insectivorous plants such as sundews and pitcher plants tolerate these anemic growing conditions.  Bog water is usually a muddy brown.  Leaves that drop into the bog slowly decompose, a process that further leaches a chemical called tannin, which further depletes life essential nitrogen. The insects insectivorous plants’ eat deftly supplement their nitrogen requirements. 

Sphagnum moss absorbs 28 times its volume in water.  This mat of moss often disguises a lake underneath it so its like walking on a wet sponge according to The Vanishing Wetlands, by Trent Duffy.  Ahhh, that’s why the word bog is a verb as well as a noun and adjective.

                        The remains of a 1900s drainage ditch



An Ode to the Wild
The Big Bog is one of the last true wild places.  It’s almost 600 square miles and is larger than the state of Rhode Island.  Between 1910 to 1929 desperate immigrant farmers and an optimistic Army Corps of Engineers attempted to transform the Big Bog into farmland by digging 1500 miles of drainage ditches. Bogs have been successfully drained in Ireland, England and Europe. But in the end, Minnesota's Big Bog could not be domesticated. 

There are places in the world that have lost human populations such as Easter Island, Chernobyl, Ukraine, ghost fishing villages in Uzbekistan miles from the receding Aral Sea, but these places were ruined by human misuse, not the innate power of intrinsic wildness, like the Big Bog.  

Pitcher plant

The Big Bog has changed little in thousands of years, albeit dented a bit by faint boulevards of ditches but its still a bog.  Moose, otter, wildcats and wolves are the true natives in these parts.  Current research has found that bogs are important ‘sponges,’ sopping up carbon dioxide.  The irony is too sweet.  Bogs may be performing an important function tax-free, by absorbing carbon in our atmosphere. The wasteland becomes the promised land.
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McGill Reporter                                                 Monday November 10, 2008

Mer bleue, Quebec, CANADA

Nigel Roulet, Director of the Centre for Climate and Global Change Research, McGill University, is leading research to determine that peat bogs the world over, act as storage for approximately 10 percent of all fixed carbon......What gives this soggy ecosystem such carbon-retaining capacity?  Precisely its sogginess...One of every 10 molecules of carbon photosynthesized remains in the bog.  That’s a gift to the biosphere.  

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Adaptations

Dwarf Trees, Scarce Birds

If your ideal tree is a stately elm with a 100-foot wide canopy basking in a palace garden in Kent then you will not be impressed with the trees of the Big Bog.  However, if you have a soft spot for the underdog you’ll find the two most prevalent bog trees, black spruce and tamarack, impressive specimens.

Peterson’s Guide to Eastern Forests states that black, or bog, spruce can reach 80 feet in height. But in a bog it can take a 100 years for a black spruce to reach a paltry 10 feet tall! That’s right, no statelier than a forsythia bush and not nearly as bushy.  Black spruce is more shade tolerant than tamarack and their cones grow at the top of the tree, so they are more resilient against fire. Trees usually grow on the edges of bogs, getting shorter then disappearing in the more acidic center.

Tamarack, or American Larch, is the only conifer tree to drop it’s needles in the fall.  Its feathery needles allow for more sunlight than denser-needled conifers so more shrubs grow under tamaracks.  Tamaracks don’t significantly produce cones until they’re 50 years old but can continue to reproduce cones until they are 150 years old.

We saw next to no birds the afternoon we spent at Big Bog.  We did spot a couple of boreal chickadees, close to the trunk of a black spruce.  Our visit may have been on the cusp of migration.  

Black spruce

High Tech Meets Bog

Such a vulnerable environment needed a deft hand to put in place a bog walk to help visitors experience a heretofore forbidden landscape.  Manufactured by Newman’s of Royalton, MN, it costs $400,000, funded by the state of Minnesota, administered through the Department of Natural Resources.

Light filtering mesh boardwalk

The boardwalk was installed in March 2005, when the bog was frozen, causing minimal damage from construction.  Lighter weight machinery was used and the boardwalk’s metal framework is anchored into silt. The flat boardwalk cladding  is a resilient, light colored plastic, a mesh-like material that allows 37% of sunlight to filter down to plants underneath.  It is invitingly wide, so a person does not experience that odd too-narrow bridge syndrome.

Bog Talk
The McGill University’s Centre for Climate and Global Change Research notes that bogs occupy only two to three percent of the global landscape. 

Such a rarefied environment has few words to describe it, so uncommon is one of the words, flark, it isn’t even in the average dictionary.  A slew of words are apropos to many watery environments such as marsh, swamp, morass, slough, fen, mire and wetland.  Less common:  muskeg, strings, ovoid islands.

And then there's the vernacular.  A British expression, bog, is a slang word for bathroom, and bog trotters is a now disparaging term for the Irish, but originally described people living or working among bogs. 

The Last Wilderness
We’ve walked this far,
Have you yet to feel the spirit of the sphagnum?
See the ghosts of caribou past?

To the west, miles of wild, wet bog
    where lemming and fisher, wolf and moose do an ancient dance,
    without a footfall to give them pause.

Underfoot
The last drops of a lake
The Agassiz, once so huge,
    the unhampered wind pounding the beach strand
    into wave after standing wave
Of land...a sort of land.

This is harsh land, sparse land, had to be to keep it’s wildness
    the beauty is subtle
    the red and green palette of moss and shrub and ragged tree
    and eccentric flower.

The wind is sweet,
    carries only the pollen, scent and seed
    of a natural design.

Here it is.
A wildness.
Make it last.
                                                       -Chris Weir Koetter, 2005
                                          Poem displayed at the end of the boardwalk

Brenda Halvorson, editor Staples World, Carol & Jim, at the end of the Big Bog Boardwalk, 2008