Fun with bugs

In mid-June at 10,200 feet, Roosevelt Lake was a wonderland. And it was also wondrously full of close encounters of the flying kind. The mosquitoes were so bad that we were not only wearing insect repellent, we were also fully clad in headnets.

And after enjoying a stunning sunset and the alpenglow on the peaks, we were ready to escape the bugs in the safety of our tent. We nimbly ducked through the mosquito netting and zipped it up quickly and carefully behind us.

P settled into his bag and closed his eyes. It had been a long day of off-trail hiking, and he was ready to sleep. M was soon to follow, and there was a wonderful stillness in the tent as she lay down to rest.

And then she sat up again.

"There's a mosquito in the tent!" she cried.

P tried to rest as she pulled out her headlamp and started scanning the tent for the offending skeeter. As he opened his eyes, P saw the beam of the headlamp slowly panning across the ceiling of the tent without success.

He surrendered, and pulled out his own headlamp and added it to the search pattern. Quietly, out of the side of his mouth, he began to make the slow, mournful siren of the air raid horns from London in the Second World War. The searchlights continued to pan across the ceiling in a random pattern.

"There it is!" M called out as she took a swipe at the MO-109 flying mosquito. She missed.

Again the lights searched the sky. Again the air raid siren wailed to life.

"Got it!" she said happily, as the bug got squished against the netting and fell slowly out of the sky. We only missed the sound effects of the tailspin as it went down.

The searchlights went off. The siren signaled the all clear. And we settled in for a quiet night's sleep, protected against the enemy by a thin wall of gauze.

0.0001 gram versus two humans: asymmetrical warfare at its utmost. And we've all been there.

Recall being driven into the tent well before sundown in the Chinook Pass region of Rainier. Bored, even with the summit view, I amused myself yanking mosquitoes through the netting with tweezers as they shoved their little drills through the openings. Long evening.

Cheers,

I'm sure we've all been there! Funny in retrospect, but not while it's happening! There are always one or two that get in, and always on a night too warm to close the sleeping bag up tight!

For that matter, the same thing occasionally happens at home, despite screens! Try to remember that while you're chasing the critters around the tent!

I always love popping them when the land on the outside of the netting, and then hearing them hit the inside of the fly.

I've been out a few times when even in the middle of the day, they are terrible. Worst is trying to fish while swatting, crank a few turns, swat, crank some more, repeat.
Duane

I just spend a few nights in southern Louisiana right next to a bayou. It was hot (in the low 80s at 9PM) and the mosquitoes were plentiful and relentless. DEET didn't close to keeping them off, even in the little bit of time it took me to set up two separate trial shelters. I was car camping so brought a few options to try in preparation for an upcoming backpacking trip. In both cases I had tarps partially set up and folded back in case of rain.

I tried two things: an REI Bug Bivy and a Hennessy Hammock. The Bug Bivy looks like a great idea: It's got a 3+ -foot diameter freestanding dome with several feet of loose netting meant to drape over whatever you're sleeping in. The flaw seems to be that if it's cool enough to be sleeping inside much of anything the mosquitoes probably aren't that bad. I tried that first and found out very quickly that it was far too warm to get inside either my silk bag liner or my MYOG Tyvek bivy. On top of that, netting draped over the campsite grass was full of enough mosquitoes to drain me dry by the time I got inside. It makes me think that something like the SMD Deschutes-Plus (Wild Oasis) would probably fail miserably in this situation.

The Hennessy Hammock worked much better. I managed to get in with only one or two stalkers and close up the Velco pretty quickly. I dressed in lightweight running clothes and didn't pull the Tyvek over me until after midnight. That worked pretty well for two nights, although the buzzing was still very close to my ears and insistent until well after midnight -- enough to keep me up. I awoke the second night with a bunch of bites on my back, some determined bloodsuckers must have gotten their straws through the hammock nylon plus my running shirt. There's no question that the Hammock is best in heat: I think that even without bugs I would have been unconfortably warm on the ground and certainly on a sleeping pad.