"My buddy Paul and I hiked about 47 miles in the Blue Mountains over the weekend. I have never seen so many ticks in my life! I was pulling them off me constantly. The bugs in general were out of control. When night fell the ground became a sea of crawling critters that we shared our bed with. At one point on the Crooked Creek trail we found ourselves walking through 8 foot tall grass that had completely overtaken the trail, which caused our exposed skin to break out in a rash. We also came through while everything was in bloom, so the pollen was at a level I've never seen before and had us sneezing up a storm. Clouds of pollen shook from plants as we pushed through the overgrown trails. We encountered a lot of unmaintained, eroding, overgrown trails in general. An aggressive squirrel decided the sweaty, pollen coated straps of my backpack would be a good meal while I was asleep and destroyed my pack. At another point a swarm of wasps surrounded my backpack, but I managed to retrieve it only getting stung 3 times. Paul damn near stepped on a rattlesnake. Thank god he didn't, because we were pretty deep at the time. Let's see, what else... We walked an extra 7 miles of forest road ea..." — Al-Rashid • Jun 23, 2017