(insects chirping) (wind whooshing) - [Narrator] Washington's Olympic Peninsula is full of the kinds of things you'd expect from a rainforest, big trees, lush undergrowth, delightful creeks.

But there's something else hidden away here, something no one had ever identified before in the western U.S., until Joe Rochio found it one day in 2011.

- Came in one morning, as i made my way in, I was not expecting to find what I did at this place.

- [Narrator] Joe is a Natural Heritage Program manager for Washington's Department of Natural Resources.

His job is basically to seek out and identify the state's natural wonders.

- We always feel like we're on a little bit of a treasure hunt and I felt like I found a chest of gold when we came out here.

- [Narrator] What Joe found is called a raised bog, and the first indication that this is a different kind of place is that the peaty, mossy ground isn't just squishy, it actually moves in waves underfoot.

(shoes thumping) - Some people think like, it's like a waterbed, I think it's more like walking across pillows.

So when you jump on it, the surface can undulate pretty far out from where I'm located.

You can see the water moving.

- [Narrator] But even that's not the strangest thing about this place.

A raised bog is different than an ordinary bog because it sits higher than everything around it.

- The water levels over here are actually lower than they are at the top, which is counter-intuitive.

(laughs) - [Narrator] The way it works is like this, most bogs are like sinks, or filled-in ponds, lush with grasses and plants and fed by streams or creeks.

What Joe found seemed to defy gravity.

Imagine a bubble, holding water and earth together like an inflated bladder, and sitting 9 feet higher than the surrounding landscape, and there are no streams feeding into it.

Instead, a raised bog captures only rainwater and then drains that water down, slowly, out to the shoreline.

- And that's what makes Crowberry Bog so unusual.

They weren't thought to exist here.

- [Narrator] The entire bog is only 40 acres in size.

It's surrounded by western hemlock and cedars, but the heart of the bog is treeless, because decomposing moss and rainwater create an acidic soil that's tough on trees.

It's an unusual combination of conditions that provides home to an equally unusual variety of specialized plants.

- There's so much biodiversity that we just lump into the ground surface, or you can stand from here and just see brown and red.

And if you don't get on your hands and knees, you don't see the small, little sundew that right now is hidden.

There's all these little bugs crawling over the surface.

There is just so much diversity that is at a microscale, some of it, you can't even see with a hand lens, you have to put it under a microscope.

- [Narrator] Crowberry Bog is filled with skunk cabbage and bog laurel, cranberry, and the bogs namesake, crowberry.

There's even a type of moss called small capsule dung moss.

It only grows in bogs like this, and only on the poop of elk or deer.

- And so this is, I think, the second or third location in the state where this moss has been documented.

Everyone finds their own space.

What is it about elk dung here that makes it unique to this particular moss, I don't know, but it's very cool, the ecology is just amazing.

- [Narrator] In this microscopic world at our feet, we saw battles underway between tiny insects and carnivorous plants, called Roundleaf Sundew.

And the spongy soil itself is almost almost all peat moss.

- Peat mosses are the ecosystem engineers of bogs, they built this place.

- [Narrator] It's remarkable that this area remains intact.

- [Joe] That's all peat moss.

- [Narrator] Peat moss is often sold as a landscaping material, and many bogs like this were heavily mined in the past.

And historically, it had other uses, as well.

- I came across a paper and it talked about a national effort to harvest peat mosses for World I, because sphagnum served as an incredible bandage.

Sphagnum peat moss absorbs 20 times its weight in water, so it's very absorbent, plus, it's very acidic, it's an antiseptic.

The community would go out and collect, it looked like live sphagnum, and put them in big bundles and send them off to the army for WWI.

- [Narrator] At the far end of the bog, Joe spots another oddity, shore pines, standing only about 4 to 6 feet tall.

- You can see that most of these trees look relatively young and short, and they're actually quite old.

It almost takes on like, a bonsai-like form in some areas just because of the harsh growing conditions.

- [Narrator] Some of these dwarf trees may be as old as the towering timber of nearby Olympic National Park.

- We pulled a tree out at once point, 70 years old.

(gentle jaunty music) - Crowberry Bog is now a state natural area, and Joe had a lot to do with that effort.

- This place is near and dear to my heart.

I was coming out so often, that my kids started calling this Daddy's Bog.

"Dad, where you going?"

"Going to the bog."

And they knew exactly where I was talking about.

- [Narrator] Public access is limited for now to educational visits by appointment to help ensure the bog's health, but also to preserve any unknown wonders still waiting to be discovered.

- You know, I've spent 20 years doing this kind of work, and this place still surprised me.

We really have just a cursory understanding of what's here.

But if we're protecting representative examples of all the different ecosystem types, then we hope by default, we're providing some level of conservation to all these species we have no idea even exist in these sites.

(plants rustling) (light gentle music) (no audio) - Great people just doing their thing in their own Northwesty way, we love bringing you stories like this.

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