[pct-l] Snakes and insects

[Brian Lewis]

Fenu wrote on the topic of Rattlesnakes:
"This is as close to a first-person account as i could find:
http://www.trailjournals.com/entry.cfm?id=187616"

There are lots of first-person accounts out there about encounters with
snakes.  I started with the herd this year, the day after the kickoff.  At
the kickoff I recall someone saying that snake encounters are fairly rare
and that we should appreciate the opportunity if we get it.   I saw my first
snake the first day, almost stepped on it, and had another such encounter
some days later, plus a couple less up-close-and-personal encounters, and my
experience was far from unique.   Everyone is different, but having never
hiked in rattlesnake country before, I was (oddly) if anything even more
comfortable about it after my first encounter.    The snake seemed quite
polite: once I jumped away and it was clear I wasn't attacking him, he (or
she) quickly slithered into a crack in the rock, so my biggest
post-adrenalin reaction was of disappointment that I couldn't take a
picture.   I'm not trying to paint a picture of me as a rugged outdoor hero
type, just that the interaction reinforced for me that with a little
caution, the odds are that snakes are not a problem.    Ditto cowboy
camping; various people expressed concern about "things crawling over my
face" or the like, but I think this too is something one becomes more
comfortable with after just doing it for a while.

The thing that's reassuring to me is that a whole lot of thru-hikers I
talked with in the first few weeks had snake encounters and I didn't hear of
anyone being bit.   It boils down to statistics to me; It's not hyperbole
when I say that I feel safer on the trail (in or out of snake country) than
I do when driving on the freeway.

W.r.t. insects, apart from what the fledgling PCT faq says,
http://postholer.com/faq.php#Mosquitoes
and what you can doubtless find via searching past discussions ...

Jereen Anderson said: "To repel insects and ticks I wore insect-repellent
cloths made by ExOfficio- shirt, pants, socks, and hat."

I expect this is a fine strategy for those doing the PCT on horseback, but
for hikers I would suggest caution.  I had mailed an ExOfficio "Buzz-off"
shirt to Kennedy Meadows to swap into that for the Sierras, but I ended up
mailing it back home the next day.  I had heard from someone at KM that they
developed a rash on their back from wearing such a shirt, and an internet
search via the internet trailer there turned up this:
http://tinyurl.com/9gye5j*

*So I would urge some caution in using the buzz-off shirt for relatively
long distance hiking.  Mosquitos could bite right through my thin shirt, but
I nevertheless liked it, and various strategies (I think they've all been
mentioned?) made it not all that bad. In fact (FWIW), possibly because the
fires got class of '08 into Oregon a bit earlier than normal plus the snow
lingered later there, the middle part of Oregon was as bad and lasted longer
than bugs I encountered in the Sierras.   YMMV on that one, of course.


Brian Lewis / Gadget '08
http://postholer.com/brianle