It will soon be springtime in the Rockies! Okay, as I write this it is only early February, but spring will be here soon enough. Trust me, it will happen. Snow will melt, grass will green-up, buds will expand and birds will return. And when this annual transformation occurs, you can count on mountain rivers and streams swollen with snow-melt. And you can also count on ticks.
First the good news: The deer tick that carries Lyme Disease is non-existent in most of the high Rockies where we run guided backpack trips in Wyoming and Montana. It’s a good thing, too, because those little buggers are difficult to detect. By contrast, the wood tick — which can carry either Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or Colorado Tick Fever — is a bigger, flat-bodied usually reddish-brown annoyance that is relatively easy to detect — if you take the time to look. More on that later. Now, though, here’s the bad news: our guided hiking tours in Yellowstone and elsewhere in the northern Rockies are in wood-tick country. And if you’re out in the big wilds between mid-April and late June, you just might encounter this little parasite.
But fear not! A bit of vigilance will derail any tick-related problems. More good news is that a tick must be embedded in your anatomy for quite a few hours in order to transmit either disease. Moreover, in the areas we visit in the spring, the incidence of either tick-carried fever — and both can be cured with antibiotics — are very low. And because the wood tick is fairly large and obvious, if you do a tick check in the morning and again in the evening, and carefully remove any of the little hitchhikers (with either fingers or tweezers, being careful not to leave the head embedded — and then wash the area!), you’ll be fine. In fact, our clients rarely find any ticks, even on our June trips, but better safe than sorry. And besides, doing tick checks can be utilized as foreplay if your sex partner is along on the trip with you!
Even if you’re on your own, though, you needn’t lose any sleep about ticks, at least on any of our guided Yellowstone hikes or any of our other trips in the mountain West. They simply aren’t too abundant where we go, and just a little vigilance once you’re on the trail will head off any potential problems.
