I initiated this column with the sole intention of describing the distinctive high-elevation natural areas botanists classify as “heath balds,” otherwise know” to native mountaineers and backcountry hikers who have become waylaid in them as “laurel hells.” My objective was to consider some of the more interesting botanical and anecdotal aspects regarding this sometimes foreboding habitat. Rather quickly, however, I discovered that it wasn’t feasible to discuss laurel hells without placing them in a context that included grassy balds, the upland grassy areas of the southern highlands whose origins are still being debated today.

The word “bald” has several meanings, of course, but when applied to terrain it refers to the lack of “usual or natural covering;” that is, in this instance, to a virtual absence of trees where trees might otherwise be expected. The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1654 as the earliest explicit usage of the word in this context: “Where a place is bald of wood.”

Arnold Guyot, the Swiss geologist and geographer who initiated his survey of Western North Carolina in the late 1850s, was surprised to find that locals used “bald” to describe both forested and treeless areas. Nevertheless, by the time J.W. Harshberger published An Ecological Study of the Flora of Mountainous North Carolina in 1903, the word was being used in scientific circles to define areas categorized as “sub-alpine treeless formations.”

Even in the most recent scientific literature, there’s considerable confusion regarding bald types and terminology. For our purposes here, it can be observed that there are at least two general types: grassy balds and shrub or heath balds. Bald habitats tend at times to intergrade so that specific designation of a particular site as to type or subtype can prove difficult. To further complicate matters, as Guyot noted, many places in the southern mountains called balds by locals (and designated as such on USGS and other maps) are forested. Some of these sites were perhaps balds in earlier days that have been reforested, but many were simply high-elevation oak, beech, or chestnut stands with herbaceous ground covers that provided excellent grazing. Since true grassy balds provided the prime site for grazing livestock, other suitable high-elevation grazing areas were also called “balds,” especially when situated on the top of a mountain. In time, such sites often did become bald in a literal sense - that is, worn bare - due to constant use that decimated ground cover. A cogent argument, I think, could be made that high-elevation rocky summits and the tops of granite domes featuring extensive patches of vegetation could be identified as “rock balds.” These often form an ecological continuum with heath balds.

In a seminal monograph on Vegetation of the Great Smoky Mountains published in 1956, R.H. Whittaker noted the succession between rock bald habitats (lichens, mosses, tufts of grass, and cushions of sand myrtle) and adjacent heath balds on Mt. LeConte. In a true grassy bald, the terrain is primarily open, being dominated by mountain oat grass and other herbaceous species. More ink has been spilled trying to explain their origin than on any other of the region’s diverse natural areas. For what it’s worth, this writer suspects that — like the periglacial boulderfields also found at higher elevations - some of the initial grassy openings could have been forged during the Pleistocene Epoch 20,000 or so years ago when dramatic freeze-thaw intervals involving frost heaving and soil erosion occurred. These openings could have been expanded and maintained by wind, dryness, cold, fire (natural and man-made, starting with the earliest Indians who penetrated the region), and grazing (by settlers’ livestock as well as by the herds of elk, caribou and additional grazing animals that once populated the region).

Whatever their origin, these lovely natural areas are apparently not being created at the present time; indeed, those now in existence on public lands that are being “protected” from fire and grazing are increasingly invaded by shrubs and trees so that they are literally disappearing in our own time. In areas like Roan Mountain (along the Tennessee-North Carolina line) and Craggy Gardens (along the Blue Ridge Parkway north of Asheville), grassy and heath balds noticeably intergrade. This makes it possible, in places, to stroll through delightful environments that have been described as “grass-heath balds” or “heath gardens.” In a true heath bald or laurel hell, however, there’s full coverage of the terrain by a variety of evergreen shrubs, primarily mountain laurel and rhododendron. Although heath bald types intergrade, sometimes inexplicably, it can be observed that mountain laurel and rosebay rhododendron tend to dominate sites in the lower elevations, with Catawba rhododendron dominating higher sites. Rosebay rhododendron is generally absent above 5,000 feet, while mountain laurel persists as a component up to 6,000 feet. The shrub canopy ranges from 10 to 12 feet in height in lower protected areas to 3 or 4 feet on exposed ridges and summits.

If you’ve ever been lost and befuddled in a laurel hell, you know that it’s a laughing matter only in retrospect. On one of our initial, unsuccessful searches for Tsali’s Rock back in the early 1980s, some of us got tangled up in a laurel hell way up on the Left Fork of Deep Creek under Clingmans Dome. Belly-sliding around in the snow trying to get “under” the hellish thickets of rhododendron was bad enough, but the situation was further complicated by the intermittent growls of a family of black bears who resided therein. They hadn’t been expecting guests.

Let’s give the last 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.’”

(George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.)

 

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