The wilderness, the creek, and the vanished town are all named for Lindera benzoin, the spicebush or spicewood - a native understory shrub of the Appalachian hardwood forest. Crush a leaf and you get a smell somewhere between allspice and lemon. Indigenous Appalachians used it as a tonic, and 19th-century settlers brewed its twigs into a tea that they claimed cured everything. The shrub thrives in the same rich moist hollows where sugar maple and tulip poplar grow tallest, and in May it puts up small yellow flowers before its leaves emerge. Whoever named Spice Run was paying attention to what grew along its banks.

In the late 19th century, the Spice Run Lumber Company built a sawmill on the Greenbrier and a logging camp big enough to be called a town. Workers cut red spruce, hemlock, and hardwood from the slopes above the river and floated the logs downstream to the mill. The drives were so dense, the source records put it, that they choked the river - logs jamming on every shoal, sometimes for miles. By the 1920s the timber was gone and the company folded. The town emptied within a few seasons. The forest grew back through the abandoned cabins and the rusting machinery. Of the original community of Spice Run, exactly one house remains standing today.

In March 2009, President Obama signed the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act, which included the designation of Spice Run Wilderness along with several other newly protected areas in the Monongahela National Forest. The wilderness covers about 6,030 acres of second-growth forest along the Greenbrier River. Wilderness designation under the 1964 Wilderness Act is the most restrictive protection in the federal toolkit: no roads, no motorized vehicles, no mechanized equipment, no permanent structures. You hike. You camp. You leave no trace. The Forest Service does the absolute minimum required to keep the area safe for visitors, and otherwise lets the forest run on its own clock.

Three watersheds drain through the wilderness: Spice Run, Davy Run, and Kincaid Run. All three are native brook trout streams, which is to say they are cold, well-shaded, and supporting the original wild fish of the Appalachian highlands - not stocked hatchery fish, but the small, brilliantly colored trout that have lived in these waters since the last ice age. Brook trout require water under about 68 degrees Fahrenheit to survive, and the survival of populations like these depends on the forest canopy that keeps the streams shaded. The 2009 designation effectively guarantees that the canopy will be there a century from now.

Federal records list 230 species of birds in or passing through the wilderness, and nine species on the federal sensitive or watch list - including the West Virginia northern flying squirrel, a high-elevation subspecies that depends on red spruce and northern hardwood forests of the type that grow here. The squirrel was listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1985 and delisted in 2013 following successful habitat restoration, though monitoring continues. On the opposite side of the Greenbrier River, the Greenbrier River Trail follows the old Chesapeake and Ohio Railway grade for 78 miles between Cass and Caldwell. Standing on the trail looking across at the wilderness, you can see the bank where the lumber mill once stood, and beyond it, second-growth forest that is steadily working its way back toward the kind of ecosystem the loggers found when they arrived. It will take centuries. It is happening anyway.