[erghjunk]

No, off trail - hunting, fishing, mushroom hunting, flipping rocks, playing around etc. Ticks are everywhere that animals are in my experience, however, and a hiking trail is no exception. Tall grass does seem worse but I’ve had many days in big woods where I ended up with ticks.

[georgeplusplus]

Good to know. Are they easy to spot? When they first latch on and start feeding , they're so tiny I feel like I can miss them quite easily

[erghjunk]

lone star ticks and dog ticks are relatively easy to spot as they are "big" in the grand scheme of things, but they are still pretty tiny. deer ticks, the primary carrier of lyme disease, are notoriously small and very hard to spot. as I understand, the really tiny ones (often referred to as "seed ticks" because they are the size of tiny seeds) are very unlikely to actually carry lyme disease because they will not have attached to a carrier yet (they aren't born with lyme disease), but I don't have a reference handy for that and I don't want any tick attached to me, big or small, in any case.