View Full Version : Quick question-what month should I start carrying DEET?
Not carrying it in the beginning, should I have it shipped to me when I send my cold weather gear home after Mt. Rogers, VA?
From my experience, you can have gnats and other flying nuisances as early as GA, but for mosquitoes, you don't really need it until NJ. through MA.
Blissful
02-23-2007, 00:22
Yeah, I was wondering that too. Right now I have a small spray bottle sitting in my mail drop for after I get out of the Smokies - for Standing Bear farm hostel. I may put it in a later drop, though. I plan to use the Cutters Advanced. And a bug net thingie for New England, which wears like a shirt and covers my head. I must say I hate DEET.
Carnivore
02-23-2007, 00:51
Get Deet after Harpers, probably PA. Just make sure you have it before you hit the mosquito clouds in New Jersey.
Spirit Walker
02-23-2007, 01:47
I'd say Delaware Water Gap. Before that they were a minor annoyance, in New Jersey-Massachusetts a major one. Not continuously, but often enough. We hit DWG on July 1.
Earl Grey
02-23-2007, 06:29
If you walk fast enough they cant catch you. :banana
max patch
02-23-2007, 08:13
Not carrying it in the beginning, should I have it shipped to me when I send my cold weather gear home after Mt. Rogers, VA?
A bottle of deet weighs next to nothing; I carried mine from day 1 so that I'd have it when I needed it. I have no idea when I used it for the first time.
NJ skeeters were nothing compared to the ones in MA.
Blue Jay
02-23-2007, 22:59
NJ skeeters were nothing compared to the ones in MA.
You got that right. They'll be digging themselves out of the snow up here any day now. Some of them eat DEET as an appetizer. Just past Jug End we used to use flame throwers but the damn things took them away from us and beat us with them. This is why on Trail Journals you don't see very many entries from MA, you're too busy running to write anything.