When eight white-tailed deer arrived from Michigan in January 1930 and were released near Parsons, West Virginia, the Monongahela National Forest was not yet what anyone would call wild. The surrounding hillsides had been clear-cut at the turn of the century. The deer that had once roamed these slopes were nearly gone. But the federal government, working under the 1911 Weeks Act, had been buying back the wreckage of the eastern logging boom, parcel by parcel, since 1915. Those eight deer - and seventeen more released between 1937 and 1939 - became the seed of a rebuilt herd. Within fifteen years, farmers in the surrounding valleys had to patrol their fields at night to keep the deer out of their crops. The Monongahela National Forest is, in many ways, the story of what humans can put back if they decide to stop taking.
The forest now covers over 921,000 federally managed acres within a 1.7 million-acre proclamation boundary, spanning portions of ten counties. Within those bounds lie the headwaters of six major rivers: the Monongahela, Potomac, Greenbrier, Elk, Tygart, and Gauley. The Allegheny Front cuts through the eastern edge, creating a striking rain-shadow effect - 60 inches of precipitation falls on the west side, about half that on the east. Elevations range from 900 feet near Petersburg to 4,863 feet at Spruce Knob, the highest point in West Virginia and the entire Allegheny range. Roughly 75 tree species grow here, with red spruce, balsam fir, and mountain ash particularly important to the ecology. Almost all of the forest is second growth, recovered from the heavy cutting that ended the timber boom.
In 1943 and 1944, parts of the forest became something stranger: a practice artillery range, mortar range, and assault-climbing school for the United States Army. Soldiers preparing for World War II in Europe trained on Seneca Rocks and other cliffs around the forest. This was the Army's only low-altitude climbing school - the place where the techniques American troops would carry into Italy and France were taught and tested. Artillery and mortar shells fired during those exercises are still occasionally found in the forest today, more than eighty years later. The West Virginia Maneuver Area, of which the forest was a key piece, gave the region a brief, unusual military presence and a generation of climbers who learned the basics on quartzite ridges in Pendleton County.
Today the forest holds eight congressionally designated Wilderness Areas, ranging from the 47,815-acre Cranberry Wilderness to the much smaller Big Draft. The Dolly Sods Wilderness, with its windswept heath barrens and bog plant communities more characteristic of Canada than central Appalachia, is among the most distinctive. Roaring Plains West, Otter Creek, Laurel Fork North and South, and Spice Run round out the protected backcountry. Beyond those wildernesses, the Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area concentrates the forest's most famous landmarks - the highest peak and the 900-foot Tuscarora quartzite climbing wall - in a single special-use unit. National Natural Landmarks include Cranberry Glades, Canaan Valley, the Germany Valley Karst Area, and Gaudineer Scenic Area, a 50-acre stand of virgin red spruce that escaped the saws.
Wildlife came back in waves. The fisher, believed extinct in West Virginia by 1912, was reintroduced in 1969 when 23 animals were translocated from New Hampshire to Canaan Mountain and Cranberry Glades. The Monongahela's old-growth stands - 318 documented acres total, including Fanny Bennett Hemlock Grove and Gaudineer's virgin red spruce - represent a fragmentary record of what these mountains looked like before the saws arrived. Twelve rivers are under study for possible inclusion in the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. Cattle and sheep graze on about 7,000 acres. A modest commercial timber program continues, averaging $7.5 million in sales per year on a forest where 81 percent of the canopy is now over 60 years old. The Monongahela is not a place restored to wilderness. It is a place that learned, after a century of mistakes, how to manage being inhabited.
Centered roughly at 38.93 degrees north, 79.85 degrees west, headquartered in Elkins, West Virginia. Best viewed from 6,000 to 10,000 feet AGL, where the forest's mosaic of ridges, valleys, and wildernesses becomes legible. Nearest airports include Elkins-Randolph County (KEKN) and Greenbrier Valley (KLWB) to the south. Watch for the Allegheny Front as a major visual marker - the abrupt eastern escarpment between the high plateau and the lower Ridge-and-Valley country. Mountain weather can change quickly; afternoon convective activity is common in summer.