Almost spring meander

Another calm and sunny day. We wanted to explore an interior bog-like place that shows up on the Google Earth satellite picture of the island. Actually, from looking at that satellite picture you can see that huge swaths of the interior are bogs.

But the interior bogs are secret places, ringed all around by forests so that you can't see them from the road.
We walked along a forest path that was made either by a deer hunter or a surveyor. In either case they went to a lot of trouble.

Or it could have been made by the gnomes, since one of their houses lies along it.

Then we walked into the bog. This particular bog is well along in its transition to a forest. Long, long ago it would have been a glacial depression, then a pond. Now the spruce are moving in. Bayberry is well established, and the ground around those bushes is fairly firm.

But there are many places where it would be impossible to walk without getting sucked down to the nether world. And we saw lots of northern pitcher plants and sphagnum moss, both bog species.

I felt surprised to find myself standing inside this large open space that can't be seen from the outside. It made me wonder how many more places like this there are on the island. But unless there's some sort of trail or path into them, they really are very hard to reach.