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[pct-l] Re: ticks (was Section A/B water and trip report)

On 4/22/97  BLISTERFREE wrote:
>Regarding your comments on the tick situation - is it really this bad, or
>even worse generally?  Two ticks per hour?  I thought Virginia on the AT was
>bad with only two ticks found on myself.  At what elevations on the PCT in
>California would one generally expect a tick problem?  Is this something
>confronted mainly while bushwacking through growth around Riparian sections,
>or more widespread than that?  Any insight would be welcomed.  

Ticks out here are quite large compared to the ones back east, so they are
easy to spot. They seem to take quite a while to bite, so in the several
years of hiking and running on So-Cal trails and of the 1000 or so ticks I
have picked off my legs, I have only been bitten once. From my experience I
thought that two ticks an hour was low, not high......

Lyme is found in CA, but it is extremely rare among the ticks gathered and
tested by the State Department of Health, but I did do a course of
tetracycline after the bite. I didn't know it when I started the
antibiotics, but a tick has to be in you for over 24 hours for any transfer
of Lyme or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and the chances of not spotting a
tick that long are very low. I did not get that bite while hiking the PCT,
I got it in Cuyamaca State Park, just west of the trail. I found the tick
the next morning.

In 95, in the Piutes (north of Tehachipi, south of Walker Pass) I was
picking up 10-20 of the buggers an hour in some sections. Even with that, I
considered the foxtails in that area to be more of a problem than the ticks.

Ticks seem to be much denser in some places than others and can be found
anywhere that grass overhangs the trail, not just in the creekbeds. From
what I have read, the density may be more related to the time of day and
temerature/humidity than the actual location: Ticks crawl up to the tips of
the grass blades and wait for an amimal to come along to latch onto. They
crawl back down to the ground when it gets too hot. Usually you will find
that the leader in a group gets all the ticks, and the ones behind only
brush agains tick-free grass. 

I hike in running shoes, and lycra bicycle shorts. I  couldn't imagine
wearing long pants tucked into my socks. I DO make a point to stop every
hour or so and to a Tick (or "tock") check, and after my one tick bite, I
make sure  when I stop for a break, I always sit on my sleeping pad in a
place where I'm not sitting in or leaning on any grass (guess where my bite
was <g>).


--
Brick Robbins
San Diego, CA          
brick@ix.netcom.com              
http://www.netcom.com/~brick 
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