Rhododendron and Mountain laurel provide beautiful blooms in the late spring and early summer in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Those thickets can also have a dark side, as two hikers recently learned the hard way.

According to a park report,

On the afternoon of March 4, 2009, park dispatch received a report that two hikers, both men in their 60s, were an hour and a half overdue from a 15-mile day hike in the Tremont area. They were reported to be experienced day hikers who were in the process of hiking all 900 miles of trails within the park.

Shortly thereafter, dispatch received a call from one of the men, who reported that they’d mistakenly gotten off the Panther Creek trail while trying to navigate around a large downed tree. They’d walked for about three hours in dense rhododendron, but had been unable to relocate the trail. They were unable to start a fire due to snow on the ground and wet conditions, and one of the men was reportedly cold and shivering.

Wildlife technician Rick Varner and ranger Steve Spanyer interviewed the men via cell phone and determined that they were most likely off-trail on a finger of Timber Ridge between Lost Branch and Panther Creek. Since one of the hikers was evidently in the first stages of hypothermia and since temperatures in the twenties were forecast for that night, IC Helen McNutt decided to begin an off-trail search after dark.

Ranger Todd Roessner and wildlife technician Dan Nolfi hiked in to the Panther Creek trail and found tracks going off the trail. The tracks showed that the hikers had missed a switchback, gone directly into the woods, encountered the downed tree, then became lost after going around it.

Nolfi and Roessner tracked the men through thick rhododendron and steep terrain until they made voice contact with them. Due to the dense vegetation, it took Roessner and Nolfi nearly two more hours to reach the two men.

If you've never had the experience of trying to travel cross-country through such terrain, count yourself fortunate. A Forest Service publication notes that in the Appalachians, rhododendron is sometimes called "laurel," and "can form a thick and continuous subcanopy known locally as 'laurel slicks' or 'laurel hells.'"

That second term is a polite, but accurate, description of those thickets for anyone trying to penetrate them. Horace Kephart, in his 1906 book Camping and Woodcraft, describes another hike in a laurel hell:

Two powerful mountaineers starting from the Tennessee side to cross the Smokies were misdirected ... They were two days in making the ascent, a matter of three or four miles, notwithstanding that they could see out all the time and pursued the shortest possible course. I asked one of them how they had managed to crawl through the thicket. "We couldn't crawl," he replied, "we swum..."

Fortunately for the lost men, the searchers persevered and reached the duo. Both hikers were able to walk back to the trailhead, although one was taken to a nearby hospital due to concerns about dehydration and exhaustion.

This incident had a successful outcome, and hopefully there were some lessons learned from the experience. That education for these hikers probably includes a greater appreciation of pioneer monikers for a Rhododendron thicket.