Plants Are Apparently Evil

George Ellison of The Smoky Mountain News writes:
 
Let’s give the last [and first...] word to Horace Kephart, who describes “laurel hells” to a T under the heading Thickets in the second volume of Camping and Woodcraft (1906): “A canebrake is bad enough, but it is not so bad as those great tracts of rhododendron which ... cover mile after mile of steep mountainside where few men have ever been. The natives call such wastes ‘laurel slicks,’ ‘woolly heads,’ ‘lettuce beds,’ ‘yaller patches,’ and ‘hells.’ The rhododendron is worse than laurel, because it is more stunted and grows more densely, so that it is quite impossible to make a way through it without cutting, foot by foot; and the wood is very tough. Two powerful mountaineers starting from the Tennessee side to cross the Smokies were misdirected and proceeded up the slope of Devil’s Court House, just east of Thunderhead. 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,” meaning they had sprawled and floundered over the top. These men were not lost at all. In a ‘bad laurel’ (heavily timbered), not far from this, an old hunter and trapper who was born and bred in these mountains, was lost for three days, although the maze was not more than a mile square. His account of it gave it the name that it bears today, ‘Huggins’s hell.’

Who would have thought that laurels and rhododendrons could be so sinister?