Qualla: Bear Rocks Preserve

Bear Rocks Preserve: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raeky, CC BY-SA 3.0. Look at the red spruce trees on Bear Rocks and you can read the wind. Their branches grow only on the eastern side, flagged out in the direction the prevailing westerlies push them. Anything that tries to grow into the wind gets stripped by ice and rime frost. The result is a forest of one-sided trees standing on the lip of a 2,000-foot escarpment, watching seven mountain ridges roll out toward Virginia.

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Image: Raeky | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bear Rocks Preserve: The Most Photographed Cliff in West Virginia

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raeky, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bear Rocks is a group of sandstone outcroppings on the crest of the Allegheny Front, on the eastern edge of the broad plateau that contains the Dolly Sods Wilderness. The Nature Conservancy owns and protects 477 acres of it as the Bear Rocks Preserve. On a clear day the view from...

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Image: Raeky | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bear Rocks Preserve: Tundra in West Virginia

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raeky, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bear Rocks looks more like a piece of subarctic Canada than the central Appalachians. The combination of altitude - around 4,000 feet - and constant strong wind creates a microclimate where boreal and even ice-age tundra species hold on. Snowshoe hare move through the heath barre...

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Image: Raeky | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bear Rocks Preserve: Rocks That Hold Water

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raeky, CC BY-SA 3.0. The signature features of Bear Rocks are the boulders themselves: large, striking white sandstone and quartz outcrops, sculpted by wind and freeze-thaw cycles into bowl-shaped depressions. Many of these depressions hold water - or in winter, ice - and small algal communities live...

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Image: Raeky | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bear Rocks Preserve: Surveyed in 1746

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raeky, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bear Rocks has been on Western maps longer than most of the country around it. In 1746 a survey party that included Peter Jefferson - father of Thomas Jefferson - recorded the natural heathlands and grass balds while running survey lines across the Allegheny Front. The grass bald...

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Image: Raeky | CC BY-SA 3.0