After reading about how bad this year will be with ticks, I have a few friends who are going to avoid backpacking and hiking completely.

Over the years I’ve been fortunate to never have had a tick bite. After at least 20 overnight/week long+ trips a year for the last 30+ years, I just might have been lucky. I swear by Ben’s Deet Spray 30% for the body and 100% for clothes or very heavily infested areas. Last season I added Permethrin for clothing and gear as an added measure after reading this:

1. Spray your shoes with repellent containing Permethrin. Dr. Mather: “Treating your shoes is a good idea because the nymphal-stage deer ticks are in leaf litter, and so as your shoes move through the leaf litter, that’s where those ticks take hold. They’re not going fall out of trees, they’re not going to fly and bite you or anything like that. They’re going to latch onto your shoes and crawl up, and they can crawl up pretty fast. And they’re going to crawl up generally inside your clothes.”
2. Pants. “And so the next place that you want to create a barrier would be your lower clothes, like pants legs. You should be treating the inside as well as the outside, or buy commercially treated clothes that are treated both inside and outside.”

Good to know.

For those of you that spend time in the woods, what do you do to keep ticks at bay?