"Sometimes it's hard to know which is worse, a cloud of mosquitoes or a hike through head-high devil's club. The stem and even the plate-sized leaves sport spines with a sting. Just as alder has its redeeming features, so does this plant. ..."
-- Alaska State Parks interpretive sign at the Potter Creek trail head
The very mention of the name -- devil's club -- generates a dramatic response, something akin to cultural nostalgia mixed with pure dread. And if you live in Alaska, chances are you have a devil's club story to tell.
Robert Johnson, a Yakutat sport-fishery biologist, once got a devil's club barb stuck deep in the skin between two fingers.
"It was lodged in so well, I couldn't just easily dig it out," he said. "And a few minutes later, I felt my finger grow paralyzed."
Some Alaskans relate historical anecdotes about how this unique native shrub possesses medicinal healing properties and can magically help cure burns and arthritis.
But others curse the botanical monstrosity. They suggest, with little exaggeration, how they wished every dagger-sized spine on its veins and stems could be pulverized out of existence.
It's easy for Alaskans to recall painful memories of this mysterious species. For one thing, devil's club has a reputation for being the pervasive bad boy of Alaska's coastal forests. Ask any backcountry hiker who's had to plow through an impenetrable wall of the stuff.
The only creatures that withstand devil's club long enough to barrel through it, apparently unscathed by its infinite prickles, are bears and fishermen armored in neoprene waders, leather gloves and heavy rain jackets.
Devil's club will never make a gardener's list of top-10 favorite landscape plants. It's not a flowering shrub you can purchase at the local nursery to blend with the wild roses and northern red currants growing in the native-plant area of your garden. If devil's club happens to grow anywhere in your backyard, Mother Nature installed it. You had no choice in its aesthetic positioning.
When the Matanuska Valley colonists first arrived in the 1930s to farm in Palmer, as the story goes, each family was offered 160 acres to stake and mark. One group of settlers, upon gazing at a plot of land thick with devil's club, reportedly said something like "No way do we want that ugly, treacherous-looking piece." Consequently, they chose property with less of the nasty plant.
But the farmers who got stuck with the devil's club-infested property ended up with more fertile soil. Unbeknownst to the colonists, devil's club is considered an "indicator" plant signifying moist, well-drained soils abundant with organic matter.
BEDEVILED IN YAKUTAT
In Yakutat, everything is wet or about to become so. The watery climate suits devil's club just fine. It grows dense under the tall, old-growth Sitka spruce that line Gulf of Alaska beaches.
When I moved there in 1979, devil's club was unlike any plant I had seen. This shrub had evolved a remarkable array of defense strategies -- prickles, foul and inedible berries, secret thorns under its leaves. Even its taxonomic description is unkind: Echinopanax horridum or Oplopanax horridus -- literally spiny, bristly, rough, frightful and dreadful.
Standing next to devil's club in Yakutat was like standing next to a high-voltage electric fence. It was best to search for safe passage around it -- usually impossible since there was so much everywhere you turned. Imagine Mulcahy Stadium filled with devil's club. In parts of the Tongass, that would equate to one small roadside border, making it almost impossible to penetrate the backcountry.
But I would admire its tarp-sized leaves, how the maple shapes caught the dappled sunlight near patches of cow parsnip, salmonberry bushes and false lily of the valley. In Yakutat's continual climatic shift between mist and torrential downpour, I often thought devil's club added a certain aesthetic beauty to the deep-green landscape. Before long, I ventured out just to make botanical photographs.
A few longtime locals, like Mike Pavlik, didn't always understand my E. horridum fixation.
Pavlik, 84, has lived in Yakutat, which is surrounded by the Tongass National Forest, since 1941. He's had more experience than most, bushwhacking through bramble and indigenous vegetation over the past 65 years. On a recent visit, I mentioned to him how I had been out photographing devil's club along Yakutat's beaches and on Anchorage's Tony Knowles Coastal Trail.
"Devil's club? Go to hell with it," he said.
"I remember at loggers' camps, it would take a chain saw to get devil's club out of the way and an ax to chop it, but it sprang back to hit my nose in tender spots. You don't know how tender your nose is until you get devil's club in it. It's a painful damn thing!
"And it's everywhere in this country, and tall. Almost as tall as people. Pretty? No, I don't care for it, hell no. You have to crawl over logs to get around it. It's a bad nuisance, all right."
Another Yakutat resident, a Tlingit woman well-versed in the plant's supposed ability to reduce fevers and pain, sent Pavlik her special devil's club concoction the year before -- a tea -- in the hope that it would help improve the circulation in his legs since walking had become so difficult for him.
Pavlik proclaimed it tasted like "crap" and quickly told his family he would never try the stuff again.
MAKING THE BEST OF IT
Alaska lore is full of ethnographic mentions of devil's club, dating as far back as 1842, when Eduardo Blaschke, chief physician with the Russian American Co., reported use of devil's club ash as a treatment for sores among the Tlingit.
Today, more media attention is being focused on devil's club. National Public Radio and various science journals have reported on how its biochemistry continues to be studied by pharmaceutical interests.
Medicinal compounds -- one is called Devil's Club Supreme -- are sold over the Internet for $23.42 an ounce. The supplier claims it helps promote balance of glucose metabolism in the body. Along with devil's club root bark, the product also includes turmeric and essence of dandelion.
On a recent return trip to Yakutat, I spent $5 on a bar of devil's club soap at Jenny's Gift Shop. The label says it's made from "wild-crafted devil's club and essential oils ... an earthy soap from Alaska's forests."
Shop owner Jenny Wheeler, who's part Tlingit, tacked a reference sign on the wall for tourists who have no idea what devil's club is. Every summer, she sells devil's club ointment for arthritis pain, bars of devil's club soap for herbal bath treatments and a lip balm laced with red clover and devil's club. Most of the handmade products originate in Sitka, concocted by the WinterSong Soap Co.
"It's true the plant will do you a lot of good," Wheeler said, "but you have to know how to use it.
"I had a group of men in here that had come from pretty far away in Canada from rafting down the Alsek River. When they saw I sold devil's club products, they couldn't understand it. 'That stuff is terrible -- we hate that plant,' is what they told me.
"But after they learned about it some more, they left Yakutat with a whole different outlook."
Kathleen Tarr is a master gardener and an Anchorage freelance writer.
Have you had an encounter with this devil?
Clare Swan, a Dena'ina Athabascan who grew up on the Kenai Peninsula, says devil's club scared her as a child and after she became an adult too.
"It's a beautiful and powerful plant, but don't ever sit on it! I was out hiking with my husband once and got tired and accidentally sat down on some, but I didn't see that the leaves also had prickly spines underneath. The spines pierced my clothes, and I swelled up along the backside of my legs and backside. I called my doctor and he said to rub my skin with Tide detergent. It lasted a day or so. In the spring, though, when it first opens, I find it's really beautiful."
LEARN MORE: For more on devil's club and its traditional medicinal uses among indigenous people, check out these books:
• "Discovering Wild Plants" by Janice J. Schofield
• "Tanaina Plantlore" by Priscilla Russel Kari
• "Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast" by Jim Pojar and Andy MacKinnon
