The Bog

This tiny geological wonder is a wilderness by default.

By John Henricksson

To most who enjoy the outdoors, the word wilderness is synonymous with an area like the million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness along the northern rim of the Superior National Forest, the undeveloped wild land, sprinkled and laced together with lakes and rivers in northeastern Minnesota. To most, the BWCAW is a much-loved sanctuary away from their electronic world and into the cathedrals of the boreal forest and thousands of portage-connected lakes.

But wilderness is a word we use very carelessly. The bogs of the Gunflint region forest are the only true wilderness in this area: undisturbed, obscure, and a little otherworldly. Not the riverine or embayment bogs, or the vast peatland bogs, but the enclosed bog, usually less than 10 acres of coffee-colored water, the sedgemat- and stunted-spruce–surrounded Camelots of wilderness. Miniature natural kingdoms of mist, mystery, and beauty.

There is nothing in the bog anyone wants—nothing to cut, mine, sell, or develop—so it is a wilderness by default because no one covets its contents. Bogs grow and disappear at glacial speed, tremble with mats of decomposing vegetation and sphagnum, sometimes 30 feet deep, and are usually freckled with miniature forests of bog-willow, tamarack, black ash, sedges, and stunted black spruce several hundred years old. Bogs are mossy grottos of silence.

Over centuries the decaying vegetable material turns into peat, which records and preserves everything imbedded in it—seeds and pollens, insects, sometimes even human corpses. The word bogeyman comes, of course, from bog. Manuscripts of Nature, J.E. Potzger calls them in Bogs of the Quetico-Superior Country Tell Its Forest History.

Some of the plants growing there are often also found in either the Arctic or the tropics. Tiny anomalies. In Bogs of the Northeast, Charles Johnson describes the bogs’ ambience well: "We find them intriguing, yet we shun them as somewhat peculiar. They remain mysterious—neither solid land nor water but a realm in between. . . . An aura of spirits still emanates from them to stir our imaginations. . . . While the scientist in us seeks to understand them, the poet in us wants to keep them away from complete discovery, safe in some shadow of mystery."

In the summer they are wondrous flower realms, jewel boxes of the far north, revealing bottle gentians, rosemary, bog-laurel, sundews, cotton grass, the leathery brown blossoms of the pitcher-plant, moccasin flowers, the uncommon rose pogonia, dragon’s mouth, and bog-orchids.

Because of the acidic water and lack of food there, wild creatures usually only pass through on their way to someplace else. Red-necked grebes, Lincoln’s sparrows, great gray owls, common yellowthroats, sedge wrens, and Connecticut warblers are the birds most often seen in bog environments. Damselflies and whirligig beetles disturb the water’s surface, and a copper butterfly is found most often in the bog habitat. Frogs seem to like the bog; there is usually an abundance of chorus frogs, gray treefrogs, northern leopard frogs, and wood frogs.

Occasionally a moose will amble the shoreline if aquatic vegetables, such as water lilies, grow there. The moose stands near the water’s edge and puts its head under water, groping with huge leathery lips to wrap around a stem of the plant near the bottom, and then, with an explosion of water, jerks it out by the roots and stands for minutes leisurely chewing on the water lily tuber, which American Indians used for years as a potato. The name moose comes from the Indian moozo, meaning twig eater, and browse is the dietary staple; but the root is the favorite snack of most Gunflint moose.

There are no manmade trails to these bogs because they aren’t fishing spots; the water is too acidic from the rotting vegetation for fish. This is not game animal habitat and the open water is too small to canoe, so these bogs are virtually unknown. They are mapped but not named or labeled. Forest ecologist Chel Anderson showed me how to find them on topographic maps by searching out small free-form or circular, tightly packed, depressed concentric lines with no creek running in or out. The spot might be just a sharp dip or a dry glacial scour. Then again, it might be a 10,000-year-old ecological relict full of wonders. The only way to find out for sure is to bushwhack in or talk to timber cruisers, trappers, loggers, or conservation officers—someone whose job takes them into the trackless parts of the forest.

Some bogs in this area are home to the ellefolk, strange little people who emigrated here from Norway at about the same time the people of that country made new homes along the North Shore of Lake Superior and in the wooded uplands of the Gunflint region. Ellefolk lived originally in the bogs of Denmark, but they are solitude-loving creatures and the almost constant ringing of the Danish church bells upset them so they finally moved to wilder, quieter places in Norway. After residing in the Norwegian bogs for years, the ellefolk found that country too became noisy and crowded.

Norwegian immigrants who came here to fish the waters of Lake Superior wrote home about the natural beauties and remoteness of the Gunflint region of Minnesota, and it wasn’t long before a colony of the ellefolk decided to follow. Just how they got here is still a puzzle, but the ways of little people have always been shrouded in mystery. They can travel with great ease through air, fire, wood, water, and stone. The females can even travel on moonbeams. Ellefolk are light elves, associated with flowers and natural beauty, not the dark elves who will lead you astray.

The ellefolk men wear broad-brimmed black hats and red sashes and are about the size of children because they only grow during moonlight hours. When they first came, many lived in the forest, but after so much of that was cut down they moved to the more secluded bogs. They usually live under the crests of small hills at the edge of the bog, and they grow fabulous gardens, which are hidden in the moss. They aren’t seen by many people because they come out only during the hours of dawn and dusk, and the males spend a lot of time sitting on the edge of the bog telling stories or playing their odd, little flutelike instruments made from bog reeds and willow bark.

Some people who have poked around the bogs have found strange, flattened sedge rings and were puzzled by them. Actually, those are the rings where the ellefolk dance, and if you step into a ring you can usually feel the musical vibrations of the dance. That can be dangerous because it is said you may die if you stay in the ring too long. Many strange deaths have occurred in the bog, but it is more likely that the Norwegian legend has been mistranslated and transformation is more likely what is meant. What the ellefolk legend says is that "you will never be the same."

Most dismiss the whole concept as folklore, or worse, but I have met ellefolk at bogside several times, and was once told by Petra Woodencloak, one of the prominent little people, that in order to see them one has to believe in them. For me, that is enough, but I have often found it hard to explain to others. Fortunately, the Troll Lady was available to help me out. In real life the Troll Lady is Norwegian-born Lise Lunge-Larsen, storyteller, actress, authority on the little people of Scandinavia, and author of The Troll With No Heart in His Body.

Discussing the little people in her book, she muses, "I think they have withdrawn into an elusive world, parallel but not easily accessible to ours. In our civilized world, most people have lost touch with nature and aren’t capable of seeing the beings that live there. In Norway our lives were informed by stark and dramatically beautiful surroundings, so I knew where the trolls lived and I knew where the wood elves would play their music."

For those who never want to lose touch with nature, it might be well to discover and adopt one of the Gunflint region’s bogs. Because of its isolation and uselessness to the economy, it will always be there for you—wild, mysterious, and magic.

John Henricksson, freelance travel and nature writer and author of several books, divides his time between his Mahtomedi home and his Gunflint cabin. This piece was adapted from Gunflint: The Trail, the People, the Stories, to be published by Adventure Publications, 800-678-7006.