Ecologists describe Canaan Valley as a bit of Canada gone astray. The 25,000-acre flat valley floor sits at 3,200 feet, making it the highest large valley east of the Mississippi River. Surrounded by Canaan Mountain to the west and Cabin Mountain to the east - whose northern half forms part of the Eastern Continental Divide - the valley acts as a cold sink. Temperature inversions of 50 degrees Fahrenheit have been recorded between the rim and the floor across just 1,000 feet of elevation difference. The valley produces an average of 170 inches of snow a year. The 1995-96 winter dropped 257. Even in mild winters more than five feet falls, and in cold years the woods see snow packs over four feet deep. The Pleistocene legacy is everywhere - boreal plants, sub-arctic wetlands, snowshoe hare, cotton grass that otherwise grows mostly in Alaska and Canada.

The valley's name is contested. Local legend says a German settler named Henry Fansler, migrating from the Shenandoah Valley, reached the rim of Cabin Mountain in April 1748 and exclaimed Besiehe das Land Canaan - Behold the Land of Canaan, comparing it to the biblical promised land. But the earliest documented descriptions described the valley in opposite terms: gloomy, foreboding, nearly impenetrable, and the Blackwater River was originally called the River of Styx. Some historians have argued the original name was likely Canadian Valley, a reference to the dense northern-style spruce forest and forbidding cold - and the word Canaan is Canadian minus the d and i. Either way, the name and the legend have been linked since the 18th century, and Fansler's family lasted three years on Freeman Creek before the winters drove them out.

The Babcock Lumber and Boom Company stripped the great primeval red spruce forest off the valley by the 1920s. In 1923 the West Virginia Power and Transmission Company bought 13,230 acres of the northern valley with plans to flood it for a hydroelectric reservoir. The dam was never built. As one wildlife biologist later put it, had a private utility not held that land at a time when wetlands were considered worthless, the northern half of the valley would almost certainly have been drained and developed in the 1950s and 60s, as the southern half largely was. Instead the power company became an unwitting guardian. In 1994 the federal government purchased the land for the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge - the nation's 500th, and now protecting about 70 percent of the valley. The valley had already been designated a National Natural Landmark in 1974 as a museum of Pleistocene habitats.

The same climate that defeated Fansler turned out to be perfect for skiing. Starting in 1950, the Ski Club of Washington, DC began developing slopes on the valley side of Bald Knob on Cabin Mountain. The result, decades later, is one of the densest concentrations of winter recreation in the eastern United States: two alpine resorts - Canaan Valley Ski Resort and Timberline Mountain - and one Nordic touring center, White Grass, all sharing the same Cabin Mountain ridge. The valley's 8,400 acres of shrub swamp and bog form the second-largest inland wetland in the United States and the largest in the central and southern Appalachians, hosting 580 plant species and more than 280 animal species. White-tailed deer are so habituated to humans they no longer flee. The valley sits between Canaan Valley Resort State Park to the south, Blackwater Falls State Park where the river plunges out of the basin, and the wildlife refuge in the middle - three layers of protection on a landscape that no one in the 1740s thought was worth keeping.