Description
With a 200-foot bluff overlooking Silver Lake, the Silver Lake Bog Preserve provides spectacular views. Peatlands like Silver Lake Bog are islands of boreal habitat in a sea of upland temperate vegetation, greatly enhancing our regional biodiversity. The plants and animals that live here are unique to these habitats—they are specially adapted to live in very moist and acidic conditions and live nowhere else. The bog began to develop after the glaciers retreated and continues to accumulate carbon year after year. In fact, one-third of all land-based global carbon is stored in northern peatlands like this one.
This 98-acre preserve has a half-mile boardwalk that provides access to get a closer look at the diversity of plants, such as sphagnum moss, evergreen leaves, pitcher plants, ferns, and wildflowers that make up the understory of forest floor. The boardwalk connects to a mile-long natural dirt tread trail with an average grade of 10% that leads through a hemlock-northern hardwood forest to a pine ridge with the bluff overlooking Silver Lake.
