Two-Mile Run © Harold Malde Directions Access to the preserve is difficult because of the extensive wetland terrain. Contact The Nature Conservancy’s Long Pond office if you wish to visit the preserve. Contact The Nature Conservancy P.O. Box 55 Long Pond Road Long Pond, Pennsylvania 18334 (570) 643-7922 (phone) (570) 643-7925 (fax)

Emerging from underground springs and seeps, Two-Mile Run feeds into Tobyhanna Creek, and eventually feed the Lehigh River. Along the way, it traverses the 2,300-acre Thomas Darling Preserve at Two-Mile Run, a place where visitors can witness an extensive mosaic of glacial wetlands.

Named for Wilkes-Barre naturalist Thomas Darling, Jr., the nature preserve attracts interest in every season. In spring, large sweet viburnum shrubs decorate the preserve with white, flat-topped flowers releasing a musty odor that earns them the nickname of “sheepberry.” During the summer, sheep laurel and bog laurel thrive in the preserve’s acidic soils. Fall reveals blueberries and a vivid palette of wildflowers. Year-round, spongy sphagnum moss blankets an array of swamps, fens, bogs and wet meadows encircled by stands of balsam fir, tamarack and one of Pennsylvania’s largest native spruce forests. The area also teems with wildlife typical of the Pocono Plateau, including black bears, river otters, and snowshoe hares, and hosts state rare plant species including bog sedge and creeping snowberry. 

For more than fifteen years, The Nature Conservancy has managed this largely wooded and undeveloped landscape. Together with numerous partners, it continues to explore opportunities to protect and expand the legacy of an ancient ice sheet that once scraped and scratched the Pocono Mountains region.

Size:  3,500 acres

Location:  Monroe County, three miles north of the own of Blakeslee

What You’ll See
Boreal wetlands with native black spruce, balsam fir and tamarack, surrounded by a forest of northern hardwoods, including eastern hemlock and red spruce. Flowering shrubs and rare plants including bog sedge, thread rush and creeping snowberry. Black bears, river otters, eastern coyotes, snowshoe hares, beavers and a variety of breeding birds including Canada warbler, black-billed cuckoo, scarlet tanager, barred owls, ospreys, golden-crowned kinglets, hooded mergansers, ravens and dark-eyed juncos.

Threats
Potential residential development.

Action
Acquiring land and enhancing public recreational access.

Milestones
Acquired 2,300 acres since 1991.

Partners
Tobyhanna Township, The Wildlands Conservancy

Things To Do
Witness colorful shrubs blooming from early May until July. Pick blueberries during the late summer and fall. Take a guided nature walk.