Mountain Laurel

Mountain Laurel in its full glory is beautiful to behold.  You can turn a corner on a hiking trail and be stopped in your tracks by the sight of acres and acres of it tumbling down the mountain side like white water river rapids.

rushing towards you

and tumbling down hill

As you get closer the subtle fragrance tickles your nose.  The buzzing bees, attracted by the flowers, are industriously collecting their nectar.  The bell shaped flowers, delicately veined in pink, are beautiful in their simplicity.

However, I rank Mountain Laurel and her cousin, Rhododendron, right up there with ticks.

My very first search EVER, after certifying my first dog Ben, was looking for a lost 9 year old girl in a vast tract of harvested timber.  Pine trees planted so close together I could barely walk through them. I was able to walk the top of my sector along a two track. Then plunged into the woven thicket of pine branches and Virginia green wire.   After spending, what I thought was most of the night bushing wacking through that, I was never so happy to see the far boundary.  We broke out of the mess and breathed a sigh of relief (ha!) at the open ground under the set of electrical transmission towers that marked the boundary of my sector.  They were set on a slope so steep most of the way down Ben and I were skiing on old leaf litter.  We were spit out at the bottom of the sector into a creek bottom.  Whew, I thought, we can do some real searching, since it was night time and the scent should be dropping into the drainage.

Oh what a naïve newbie I was.  For in front of me was this vast mat of tangled branches of old growth Mt Laurel. 

a small smattering of mt laurel

I stopped my team for a moment.  Gave Ben some water and a little food.  Readjusted my pack, made sure my head lamp was on straight, and had my clippers ready.  The Gods of Fate were probably having a good laugh at my expense, because I really had no clue of what I was getting into.

I boldly strode into the Mt Laurel and was stopped short no more than 10 feet in. Head check right, head check left.  Headlamp just showed more Laurel, no path, no nothing.  Even the stream was clogged with its branches.  Got my trusty pruning shears out.  The Gods of Fate laughed again.

When I say old growth laurel, there are branches as thick as my wrist and trunks as big around as my leg.  All the pruning shears were good for that night was to scratch an itch.

The end of my sector was supposed to be 3 drainages in or about 300 meters.  There was no navigating skill I could use to find the end of the sector.  The laurel blocked my ability to see the drainages.  And in order to pace count 300 meters I had to be able to pace.  I am not exactly sure what my pace count is when I am belly crawling under, over and through this crap.  

I had to sling my pack underneath me.  If I’d kept it on my back, I would have been so tangled it would have taken a bulldozer to get me out of there.  I even had to take Ben’s vest off because he kept getting trapped by the snarl of branches and trunks.  Once he was free of the vest, he was able to slip and slither through with no problems. Especially when he was in the creek bed.

When I and the rest of the team could finally stand upright, I made the executive decision to head up hill and back to the truck.  We weren’t accomplishing anything and could realistically become part of the problem.

That hike back to the truck was a whole ‘nother mess.  Some of us were having hallucinations from lack of sleep (I was working on 60 hours of searching with only 5 hours of sleep).  My own special hallucination was some weird floating head that looked like it could belong to some long ago mountain man, following me just on the edge of my peripheral vision. 

From that very first search, I learned to hate mountain laurel and rhododendrons with a passion.  And, yep, a lot of my searches end up in patches of those evil plants.  At night.  In the rain.  And sometimes with fog.