When I couldn’t find Muskol on the shelves anymore, I thought the EPA or some other government entity probably shut them down for selling a product that would both eat the chrome off a Chevy bumper and make you grow another arm out the middle of your back. There’s gotta’ be some sort of health and environmental risk if a product works that well to repel mosquitoes.
But even though I haven’t been able to find the original Muskol brand anymore, there is a version of Deep Woods Off! that comes in a 100% DEET formula. I grabbed some the moment I laid eyes on it, because I was headed up to the Snowy Range to help a friend build a cabin, and I wanted to keep the skeeters at least an arm’s length away from me the whole time. I really didn’t want to be stuck with my hands full of a sheet of OSB, straddling a roof ridge 30 feet above the forest floor, and have a dozen mosquitoes decide that was the perfect time to make a snack out of ol’ Ty.
Immediately upon arriving at Roger’s cabin site, I applied the 100% DEET Off! the same way I used to put on Muskol. With Muskol, I only needed to put some on my hat, around the cuffs of my jeans, and maybe a shot on each elbow, and I was good to go for at least 6 hours. But the bugs immediately attacked all the non-sprayed parts of my anatomy.
I don’t know what the difference in the formulation is, but Muskol really worked. I got the Off! to work, but it required dousing my entire body with it. You didn’t want to do that with Muskol, because that stuff ate fishing rod handles, plastic water bottles, gun barrels, or anything else it touched. Not so with the 100% DEET Off!. At least it’s not going to eat my cabin-building tools, and it’s probably not going to turn me into a mutant, but I really wish it worked as well as Muskol did.
