Making All Things New
I have been in West Virginia the past couple of days. I decided to take a short retreat to enjoy some solitude, spend some time in prayer and, of course, photograph the beauty of God’s Creation. Coming here has enabled me to visit a place I had heard about for a number of years, the Dolly Sods Wilderness.
Dolly Sods is located on a high plateau on the Allegeny Front and is part of the Monongahela National Forest. In the higher altitudes one experiences a terrain more like Alaska or northern Canada than West Virginia. It is a windswept rocky plain featuring a number of upland bogs and few trees. It doesn’t seem to belong in West Virginia and there’s a reason for that. The Dolly Sods area looks nothing like it did two hundred years ago. At one time it was a dense forest with trees almost as large as giant sequoias but that was before logging began here in the 1880s. After the area was logged there were numerous fires that literally burned the soil layer down to bare rock. The hand of man basically destroyed what was once a vast red spruce and hemlock forest.
Dolly Sods is a beautiful place today. It doesn’t look like what it was meant to be but it is still wondrous to behold. As I have traveled through this wilderness and walked some of its trails the past couple of days a verse of scripture from Revelation 21:5 keeps coming to mind–“Behold, I am making all things new!” God has taken something that man destroyed and made it into something new and beautiful.
–Chuck
(The three images above were taken this week at Dolly Sods Wilderness.)