Have you ever played hide and go seek? Of course you have. Have you ever done it in a ghillie suit? I bet you haven't! If you still like playing the game, as an adult of all things, you should try the ultimate hide and go seek challenge ever. I mean ever. We hold local competitions and have trained trackers and hunters try to find the competitors. The last one found is the winner, and usually we all chip in a few dollars, so the prize becomes at least 100 bucks or more. The rules of the game are that you must make your ghillie suit from scratch, and it must be inspected beforehand. That's right, you have to make a home made ghillie suit, and then it will be looked at. Of course there's a separate round for those who bought ghillie suit kits or whole ghillie suits, however the home made ghillie suit gets the most respect because of the time and effort put into it.



The round starts with an inspection of our local ghillie suit master, who is coincidentally also a tracker in one of the rounds, since he seems to find everyone. After the home made ghillie suits are inspected everyone fans out into a small wooded area, and by small I mean you can see through it almost, and if you walk halfway through it you can see the houses on the other side. The tracker for the event must turn around and be blindfolded and wear an old welders helmet. That way he has no advantage. After ten minutes the helmet comes off, and he can start tracking and trying to find the home made ghillie suits.

Usually what will give people away are their own emotions, because they get giddy or start breathing harder. I pad my home made ghillie suit to hide my breathing, and I also keep my breathing normal to shallow, as I close my eyes and just wait. I kind of meditate in my ghillie suit, while the tracker goes around. The last time I was able to come out in the top three, being found only after he accidentally stepped on me - which hurt. Otherwise he would have never found me in my home made ghillie suit.

This year I have made my home made ghillie suit even better, by using more burlap and also increasing the size, as far as width, while keeping the shape as flat as possible. I plan to find a dip near a tree, and then to spread my home made ghillie suit out and look like just a mound of forest mess, rather than an odd bump. A mistake some people make is to make their ghillie suits really small, and tight. I prefer spread out, so that if I do make a mound of stuff, it looks more like a gentle sloped mound, than a body covered in leaves and dirt. My home made ghillie suit is about a years worth of work put into one single bit of camouflage.