Where did that good old, brown, tan and black camo pattern go? You know what I mean. The pattern duck and goose hunters used to wear all the time. It was just splotches of dark brown, light brown and a little bit of black. Big splotches.
I’ve been complaining for years that you can’t find it anymore, but now a company called Old School has brought it back. I can’t begin to tell you how happy that makes me.
The market is now saturated with all sorts of trademarked camo patterns. Advantage Timber. RealTree. CypressBark. SwampSucker. It’s all made for hunting dog-sized whitetails in South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana.
And if you ask me, it’s not even good for that. The point of camo is to break up your image. To do that, it needs to be made up of big chunks of very different colors.
Sure, it looks great in the catalog. Even I fall for it from time to time. I pick up a catalog and see a woodland scene, and I have to look closely to see the whites of the hunter’s eyes peeping out from between a matching hat and face shield. The camo pattern is a perfect match for the environment.
But that’s a close-up, and it’s a close-up of a scene tailored for that particular pattern. I’ve been in areas where those patterns are supposed to be a perfect match, and I’ve seen guys sneaking around in the proper camo pattern. You’d expect them to blend right in, but they don’t. The problem is the small details of the pattern and the lack of difference in color between those details. From a distance, the outfit becomes a human-shaped lump.
And that’s where the camo is supposed to be at its best. In Wyoming, it’s even worse. Out here, hunters wearing those patterns wind up as a human-shaped lump that’s colored unlike anything else around them.
I still have a coat and pants in that old, brown camo pattern. I’ll keep wearing them until they wear out.
At least now I have an option for buying new gear. I haven’t seen a lot of different stuff in that pattern from Old School, but you can bet I’ll be on the lookout for more. My old stuff’s starting to get a little tattered.
