Otter Creek Wilderness Revisited

It was in November of 2020 that a different friend and I first visited Otter Creek, a large wilderness area inside West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest—easily my favorite of our now-beleaguered national forests. (The Trump regime has plans to monetize all of them for private gain.) We had a good enough visit, but limited ourselves to the southeast quadrant of the forest, missing out on its vast interior. 

After an absence of 5 years, I returned to Otter Creek with another friend—the previous one having succumbed to the siren call of getting a new job and trying too hard to prove himself by NEVER taking vacation days. Ah, but bitterness aside, this was actually a better trip. The summer days are still mild and breezy. The mountain laurel was just coming into bloom. The light mountain air was scented with freshwater and the spicy smell of an Appalachian forest. And to make matters even better, it only rained at night while we were sleeping warm and dry in our various tents—his pictured on top and my hammock tent just above. We erected a clever rain shelter by the fire but never needed to use it.

We hiked 5 miles from the south entrance almost to the middle of the wilderness area. There were plenty of places to fish and swim in the freakishly frigid water—which thing we did. In our three days there, we met not another soul except a local fisherman on Thursday and another on Saturday. But really, can you imagine it? 20 miles from Dolly Sods, where cars with out-of-state plates line every dirt road for miles, here we were the only tourists in sight. It’s true that this wilderness area lacks the broad, sweeping vistas offered by the Sods. In places, it’s just dense rhododendron thickets. In other places, it’s rocky creeks, and brooks, and tributaries. It’s all very woodsy, with none of the open meadowland of the Sods, but still so beautiful. The creeks that bubble wildly over the great stones are all worth exploring. 

Otter Creek itself is the centerpiece of the wilderness area and a magnificent body of water. But my favorite was the wild Possession Camp Run, which comes tumbling down the mountainsides in a series of narrow waterfalls. The Possession Camp Trail takes you from the area where we camped on Otter Creek all the way to the top of Green Mountain, where there are no views. Now tell me, how does a brook in the deepest forest get the name “Possession Camp Run”?  What kind of possession are we talking about here? As one who takes an interest in religion and spirituality, I hope the word refers to the folk religion of Appalachia—as in possession by demons or the Holy Spirit. I hope there’s some earthy tale of camp meetings and snake-handling and sawdust trails in the waning days of the Second Great Awakening. But I’m pretty sure “possession” probably refers to something far more banal, like ownership of a piece of land. Still a great name, “Possession Camp.”

On the banks of that selfsame run, there’s evidence of the area’s industrial past—whether logging or coal mining, I don’t know.

My friend caught a few brookies in Otter Creek. The photo below is the campsite at the top of Green Mountain, at the end of Possession Camp Trail—nice spot where demonic possessions may or may not have occurred. The photo below it is one of the many waterfalls on Possession Camp Run. I was supposed to bag the as-yet-unclaimed peaks on the nearby Stuart Knob and Bickle Knob, but my friend was in a hurry to get back to Pittsburgh.