How to Identify & Avoid Poison Oak while Hiking

Video Transcript

"Hi I’m Chris Van Londen and on behalf of Expert Village I’ll be talking about avoiding and identifying poison oak. Wow you’ve got to see this, this my friends is poison oak. Yes poison oak, get it on your clothes, even if you get it on your clothes, the resin will stay on there and when you touch it, it will get on your skin and it will spread. So how do you identify it? Real easy - you look for a plant that has 3 leaves, they don’t always look like oak leaves, but sometimes they kind of resemble an oak leaf, but they come in clusters of 3 as you see here and sometimes it looks like a vine, often it looks like a bush, a small bush. Poison oak usually likes well drained terrain that’s dry, you’re not going to find it on a low bog area, so that’s good, but if you see more like a savannah type of terrain where, I know you see oak trees and you see grass and brush then beware, beware and look for poison oak. And my God look you see it everywhere here, so be careful and stay on the trail and you’ll avoid poison oak. "