Hiking at Little Lost Creek (a Missouri park near my parents), we realized just how spoiled we are to live where we do. I know ticks are on the rise near us, and with climate change I am really looking forward to a Lyme disease vaccine when it is available. Right now though, ticks are far less common in this part of the country and so in Missouri we were far under-prepared.
While eating burgers at the Tattooed Dog we saw an article, I think in Missouri Conservationist, about hunting for morels. We decided to go hiking the next day. The trail was overgrown and it was muggy out. We had worn long pants for fear of ticks and I had mine tucked into my boots. Soon, we saw them. There were so many they were visible on plants, and then on our pants. We stopped every few minutes to pick them off our jeans and after a while we were running out of time before a storm came in and running out of patience for the parasites. Getting back to the car we checked ourselves, but still managed to bring a few into my parents house as we threw our clothes into the wash before washing ourselves. The proper way was to first dry our clothes on hot to kill any ticks that may be there, but as we had thrown them first into the washer (we were very sweaty and I felt bad about dirty clothes in their clean machine) we dried them, found a living tick!-and then dried them a second time on high heat for 20 minutes. That did seem to do the trick.
Anyway, the flowers on this trail were very pretty, and I am still glad to have seen them. We did not find any morels, I guess the ticks were our awful prize instead.
