The south breeze that blew another hint of early fall warmth into the area this past weekend was enough to keep the cottongrass swaying during an afternoon trek into the Lost Lost Swamp.
I’ve written of my journeys into the swamp, officially known as the Lost Lake peatland, many times before, but most of those adventures are in winter, particularly in late winter, when there’s a good crust that makes the trekking easy.
In late October, in an exceptionally mild fall, walking in the swamp can be a slog as the bog’s sphagnum and foundation of unsteady peat leaves you continuously off-balance.
What passes for “the ground” is always in flux. Here, the battle between land and water determines everything. Where springs well up and water flows, you’ll find fens, home to sedges and low-growing heaths, such as bog rosemary and leatherleaf. Where the land is winning the battle, thanks to centuries of accumulating peat, you’ll find slightly higher ground, populated by black spruce, Labrador tea, and boreal chickadees. Peat accumulates where cold temperatures, high acidity, and lack of oxygen essentially halt the process of decomposition. The conditions are the same ones that make pickles last forever in the refrigerator.
This is country where few ever venture, and that’s how I like it. Once, I found a set of keys under a big yellow birch that had been growing for centuries on a remote island way out in the swamp. For a couple seconds, I was disappointed at the apparent intrusion of another human into what I had assumed was my exclusive domain, until I realized they were keys I had lost myself a couple years earlier, while I laid on the ground to get a better image of the sprawling birch crown above me.
My most recent journey, with a friend, started at the Lost Lake public access, where we launched kayaks and paddled along the muskeg-lined shore to the lake’s only outlet, located on the southwest shore. Lost Lake is the headwaters of the Little Fork River, so it’s easy to see the lake’s outlet as a significant geographical point of reference.
The last of the tamarack needles were still hanging on, giving the shore the look of tarnished gold as we paddled to the west. Once at the outlet, we found different ways of landing our kayaks and extricating ourselves to reach the spongy muskeg.
Our destination was a large open stretch of stunted black spruce bog that occupy about a mile of space between two of the swamp’s several upland islands. This is northeastern Minnesota’s version of “big-sky country” since here the most common plants are the sedges that ripple in the wind. In summer, you can hear savannah sparrows singing out here, like you might on a North Dakota prairie. In October, all we heard was the sound of the wind or the occasional croak of a raven. It’s a lonely place out there as the season slowly makes its way toward winter.
While the growing season was long over, the evidence of the past summer’s production was evident in the waving white tufts of cottongrass, a type of sedge, that animated much of our journey. A closer look into the sphagnum moss at our feet revealed clusters of wild cranberries, which weren’t worth picking after several hard freezes. And if you looked at any of the stunted black spruce, you could see that year’s growth, typically limited by the lack of nutrients to little more than an inch per season. That means a 20-foot-high spruce tree could easily be over two centuries old, an old-growth forest of misshapen relics that look to be ripped from the imagination of Dr. Suess.
We had no ultimate destination, other than a momentary state of mind cleared of the rubbish of the day-to-day gyrations of our rapidly decaying human society. These are places set aside by their very remoteness and, for introverts like me, they are places to rebuild that sense of self that gets us through each day.