Wes Smalling

Star-Tribune Outdoors Editor

There's a slow-moving stretch of the Jefferson River in Montana, a swampy backchannel slough, where you can pick up some good sized trout. But it's a painful ordeal to go through for a few fish. For many years the Jeff has held the record in my mind as the most God-awful place in the world for mosquitoes.

But this summer the Mosquito Hell on Earth World Record was shattered. I found a place even worse.

It's right here in Wyoming at the high elevation lakes of the Snowy Range in mid-July. The Jefferson is downright pleasant compared to the bombardment my friends and I endured up there from the millions of relentless, DEET-ignoring, marauding daggum skeeters.

They're bigger, they're badder, they even buzz louder than other mosquitoes. I think the extra loud buzzing is them laughing at you while you spray on more DEET thinking it's going to do any good. DEET is the acronym for a chemical with a super-long name I can't pronounce let alone spell that's in mosquito repellents and usually does the trick to keep the bugs at bay. But it doesn't cut it up there in the Snowies. No matter how much you spray on there's always a few of the 100,000 little fiends swarming around you that will fly right through the stuff straight to your skin.

The Snowies are a fantastic place to visit. It's a great hike with terrific views and good fishing in the lakes, but the little vampires up there will bite through several layers of clothing. They know how to unzip tents. I swear I saw a swarm of them flying off carrying a marmot.

OK, I'm exaggerating. But they're bad. Alaska bad. Amazon River bad.

The only way to escape them was to get in my float tube and quickly kick away from shore. Once I was to the middle of the lake I'd start swatting at the ones that had followed me until they were all dead.

The peak of the mosquito hatch has passed, I'm told. I was just lucky enough to be up there at the apex of the carnage. It didn't help that among the three of us we only had two cans of mosquito repellent. Wait, let me rephrase that. There was one guy - me - who had his own can of repellent, then there were two nitwits, one of which didn't bring his.

There are usually four of us on these trips, but one of The Nitwits missed this year's trip.

We probably gave ourselves brain cancer or something spraying so much of that chemical on ourselves, but by day two we were running out of the stuff thanks to some confusion between Nitwit No. 1 and Nitwit No. 2 over whose can of DEET was whose.

Not bringing repellent is par for the course for The Nitwits. In case you missed previous columns I've written about them, The Nitwits are my very close friends that I go on an annual backpacking-fishing trip with every summer. It's usually a somewhat challenging outdoors trek that requires some endurance and ends up with some or all of us in great physical pain (I had knee surgery after last year's trip).

They're some of my best friends, lifelong buddies, but they really are nitwits. You probably have a few camping buddies just like them.

Nitwit No. 1: This is a man I've traveled much of the West with and he is a competent, able outdoorsman, more so than I in many respects. He's also a good fly-fisherman. He's a lifelong backpacker who usually has his act together out in the sticks. His problem is drinking too much Crown Royal as he sits around the campfire, then passing out early in his tent leaving the task of cleaning up the camp to the rest of us. This has become a reoccurring theme with Nitwit No. 1. One night, I swear, I'm going to pack up quietly in the dark and move to another site just to listen for the scream as he awakens to a bear rummaging through his camp.

Nitwit No. 2: Not really a nitwit, but guilty by association with the other two. Wait a minute, that makes me a nitwit too.

Nitwit No. 3: Prone to hooking himself in the neck with a barbed hook, not bringing certain necessary items such as a first-aid kit and something to cook food with, and having the ability to put out a perfectly good campfire with a single poke of a stick, Nitwit No. 3 is the most common type of nitwit camping buddy. He was inexcusably absent from this year's trip for the first time in years because, he said, he'd just landed a higher paying job that required him to start right away. For that reason alone he shall be elevated, nay demoted, to Nitwit No. 1 status from now on. A job more important than fishing? Talk about a guy with his priorities backwards.

Anyway, it was a great trip again this year. Wouldn't miss it for anything. See you next summer, nitwits.