OUTDOORS COLUMN: This forest no lost cause

CYPRESS BRIDGE In a slough off the Nottoway River south of Courtland lies an orgy of the gothic and grotesque. Few find it by accident, and those who do rarely know what they've stumbled upon.

Until 2005, the Lost For est wasn't on any map. They say true places never are.

Only briefly every year can anyone explore Virginia's most bizarre and wonderful 37 acres on foot. Today, though, is one of those times, and I'm lucky enough to have a guide, Emporia resident Kevin Kessler. He, in turn, is lucky enough to have as his guide Byron Carmean, the man who first "discovered" and named the Lost Forest. That is to say Carmean was the first person to recognize the matchless value of this grove of ancient cypress and water tupelo and call attention to it.

That the Lost Forest of Cypress Bridge can only be truly appreciated at low water goes halfway to explaining why this place remained overlooked for so long. The other half comes down to simple economics. A tree is worth logging only if it fetches more on the market than the cost to log it. That's where the impenetrable swamp comes in handy.

Kessler and I pilot his aluminum canoe just 100 yards from a boat landing to the edge of the forest. We step out into 2 inches of water, pull the canoe onto the mud and set off in search of giant trees.

That's what sets this area apart from any other in the state.

"I'd been in hundreds and hundreds of swamps all around this area and I had seen individual trees sort of like that, but never a whole stand," Carmean said, recalling his discovery. "I was just blown away."

It was September 2005 when Carmean, a horticulture teacher by trade and big-tree hunter by hobby, came around a bend in the Nottoway and decided to explore this area on a hunch. In the days following, he found state and national champion water tupelo, Carolina ash, swamp cottonwood and bald cypress.

It's the tupelo and cypress that give this place its eerie feel. As Kessler and I make our way toward the famous, now-dead cypress called Big Mama, I stop constantly to take pictures of the peculiar forms these trees take. No two are alike.

Both species are anchored to the swamp floor with giant buttresses. Cypress knees, some as high as 9 feet tall, are everywhere. Some tupelos, the old ones, have almost rotted away at the bottom.

You can walk right through the base of the Arch Tree, while its trunk and branches grow healthy above. Carmean once herded 17 adults into the hollow buttress of the Tea Kettle Tree for a picture.

That suggests another reason this area was bypassed by loggers: Tupelo and cypress often decay from the inside out as they age.

Big Mama is an excellent example. At an estimated 2,000 years old, she sits 40 yards from a clearcut at the swamp's edge. Maybe 1,500 years ago, her value on today's market would have been enormous, but even at the end of her life, she was hollow on the inside.

Big trees are judged and scored on a point system that rewards circumference (at 4½ above the ground), height and crown spread. The system heavily favors circumference. Thus, before she died, Big Mama, at more than 35 feet around, was the highest scoring tree of any species in Virginia.

We leave Big Mama on the eastern side of the swamp and venture through the muck into the interior. Kessler has a handheld GPS unit and a map with notable trees marked on it, but the search is not easy. Everywhere we turn, there's another "wow" specimen. With the GPS not really cooperating, finding the exact tupelo or cypress we're looking for is like finding a specific needle in a stack of needles.

It's no matter, though. For a first-timer such as myself, the place itself is more impressive than any single tree. We pass a tupelo with two trunks starting at about 15 feet. In the crook between them grow oak and red maple saplings - two relative youths sprouting from the slow decay of an ancient survivor.

We see deer tracks everywhere; watch a pileated woodpecker fly noisily through the canopy; witness scurrying skinks and a brood of baby butterflies. There is so much new life here amid the old.

As the morning light bends toward afternoon, we return to the canoe for lunch. A downed tree offers a dry seat as we look out over the entrance to the Nottoway. At the boat landing 100 yards away, a group prepares to go canoeing. We finish lunch and paddle past them up the Nottoway in search of a giant overcup oak. They wave and head downstream, never realizing that one of Virginia's most extraordinary and improbable natural places is a but a few paddle strokes away.