The next morning Shirley, her brother Jim and I drove about an hour west to a bog, that Shirley had found on public lands and decided from looking at Google Earth that it might be worth a trip. Dean and the other Jim took a really long paddle on the lake instead. The trailhead did not stand out--it was only this little red footbridge next to the road.

We stopped at the cemetery, which had some pretty old graves, but one of the most obvious ones was this one. Watkins Glen is not far from here, so we wondered if this person was one of the original family members.

The access to the public trail lands is through privately held property where this very nice shelter was located. The double-roofed structure in front of the shelter covers the fireplace. Once on public lands, laminated trail guides are available with a warning that terrible things would happen to you if you didn't return it at the end of the hike.

    
It was an uphill hike through a nice woods up to Cranberry Bog. Along the way we saw a number of chestnut trees that were sending up suckers from their stumps. Some were quite large and up near the bog, we even saw that at least one chestnut was fruiting.  That's great news. Unfortunately, my camera zoomed lens focused on the bare twigs in the foreground, but still there were several  visible nuts.  

The bog was wet with plenty of sphagnum moss, but it was overgrown and difficult to walk through. We saw one patch of sundews, but no other carnivorous plants that you'd normally expect to see in a bog. especially pitcher plants and fly-traps.

There were blue berries, maples, cranberries, pines and spruces. Then there was this soft floppy-headed cotton grass.

We all sank up to our knees in mud at the edge of the bog as we tried to get back to the forest. What a mess we were. We enjoyed the walk around the other side of the loop trail and the mud was mostly dry by the time we got back to the truck.

Some berries on an Indian cucumber and some pink turtlehead.

Back near the truck: a beautiful stand of staghorn sumac. That evening we enjoyed another delightful dinner with friends with an evening marimba concert by Jim's wife Avalon.  Then another outstanding lake sunset.

We headed south early the next morning and hurried, because Tropical Storm Isaac was heading toward Florida. We traveled to North Carolina in one day and we were home midday the second day. A short, but excellent adventure.