Article on Defeating mosquitos

The authors summation in the last paragraph is pretty much it.

"Wearing two loose layers of thin tightly woven cotton shirts and pants, a Boonie hat with a head net, and a pair of cotton gloves I have been able to spend hours of hunting and photographing wildlife in hot mosquito invested swamps using no insect repellant. Add a Thermo Cell and it’s a Cake Walk!"

For the entire article go here.

Yes--and that sounds great until you think about hiking in a setup like that.

The Thermacell is only good for when you are not moving.. otherwise Mosquitos are just plain irritating.. I hate using anything DEET based, but at some point, it is a neccesary evil. It's the one part of backpacking/camping that I could easily do without.

If you're hiking in the Sierra, there are non-DEET repellents that are quite effective (rate as highly as lower concentrations of DEET, and less toxic). I can't speak to elsewhere (except I did use Bite Blocker near Juneau in August successfully years ago). I've used two very successfully in the Sierra over the years: Repel with oil of lemon eucalyptus, and Bite Blocker. There's another, which I haven't tried yet, that's supposed to be even longer-lasting than DEET, called Bio-UD. click here for study Don't even try Citronella or any of the other "natural" repellents, they don't work much at all.

At this point i'm in favor of a combination of permethryn-treated clothing and DEET only where the skin is exposed. I use the time-release stuff when I use it at all.

Not perfect but the best system I've found, so far.

Cheers,