When hikers see Mikenna Smith or Kelsey Mitchell dragging a big white flag at the edge of popular hiking trails in Teton County, Wyoming, they naturally ask what the heck they’re doing. The conversation often goes something like this:
“What the heck are you doing?” hikers ask.
“Collecting ticks,” reply Smith or Mitchell, who both work for the Teton County Weed and Pest District.
“There are no ticks in Wyoming,” many hikers reply.
At that point, the women reach into a pocket and pull out a vial crawling with live, freshly collected Wyoming ticks – often dozens, sometimes hundreds.
Hikers’ replies to that are often (unprintable) exclamations of surprise.
Bottom line: There are ticks in Wyoming, and some of them can make you sick.
Tackling Ticks
Teton County Weed and Pest was the first district of its kind in Wyoming monitoring ticks, and now leads a statewide effort tracking ticks and the pathogens they carry.
“I’d been thinking about a tick program for some time,” said Smith, the district’s entomologist. “Our district and others have mosquito programs because mosquitoes vector diseases like West Nile virus, but they are not the only vectors out there. There are ticks, midges – a lot of biting things that transmit pathogens.”
To safely measure and monitor the diseases being carried by ticks, however, the district had to invest in a sophisticated and secure laboratory space.
“This used to be a storage area with a microscope,” Smith said, surrounded by freezers, centrifuges and biological safety cabinets that protect district employees and the public from any of the diseases isolated in the lab or the chemicals used to do it.
Part of the lab upgrade was hiring Mitchell, a biologist, in 2023.
“My job is to find the bugs,” Smith said. “Her job is to find the bugs within the bugs.”
And not just in bugs.
“Extracting genetic material is extracting genetic material,” Mitchell explained, “and if you can extract DNA from a tick, you can do it from a plant. So we do pathogen detection generally, in insects and weeds, and do pesticide resistance studies in mosquitoes.”
While that part of the science is pretty standard, other elements had to be modified for Teton County. Collection, for instance. The standard way to collect and quantify tick density is to drag a one-meter-square piece of white cloth along flat ground for a measured distance, then count the ticks clinging to the fabric and report tick density as ticks per square meter.
That doesn’t work on Wyoming trails.
“Our ticks out here in the mountains use the hillside vegetation, the woody brush and sage,” Smith said. “They’re on the sides of bushes waiting for something to pass by.”
So Smith pioneered a new protocol: Dragging the same one-meter-square piece of white fabric along the trailside brush with a stopwatch running as she walks. When she stops every so often to check for and collect any ticks, she stops the watch. Working up one side of the trail and down the other, her goal is to actively collect ticks – stopwatch running – for 30 minutes.
“So the measurement we get is ticks per minute,” Smith said. “It works here because it’s an encounter risk. It lets someone know that on a two-hour hike, they’re potentially exposed to X number of ticks per hour. And, because we measure the pathogen prevalence in those ticks, we can also inform them about their infection risk.”
And that can vary widely, trail by trail in the popular tourist destination.
“It seems very site specific,” Mitchell said. “In one site where we collected 200 ticks, we found zero disease, but just a few miles north there was a site where we collected 20 to 30 ticks and found two carrying pathogens. The overall infection rate in the county is about 0.5 percent, but on that trail it’s 10 to 15 percent.”
Tick Diseases
The two most common ticks in Teton County are the Rocky Mountain wood tick – “the state tick of Wyoming,” Smith jokes – and the American dog tick. The latter was only recently detected in Wyoming and is considered established in Sheridan and Platte counties.
Both species can transmit Rocky Mountain spotted fever to humans, a bacterial disease that is treatable with antibiotics but can lead to serious health problems (including death) if untreated. Rocky Mountain wood ticks can also carry and can transmit Colorado tick fever, a viral disease that presents in people like a bad case of flu. Both species can also cause other conditions like tick paralysis.
Wyoming does not have lone star ticks, a species that can cause alpha-gal syndrome that makes people allergic to red meat.
“The nearest known population of lone star ticks is in Nebraska,” Smith said. “They come in on animals sometimes and there are travel cases, but they’re not established in the state.”
The state also doesn’t have blacklegged ticks, also known as deer ticks, that carry and spread Lyme disease.
“With any vector-borne disease, you need the host, you need the vector and you need the pathogen to overlap in space and time,” Smith explained. “In the case of Lyme disease, we don’t have the host, which is the white-footed mouse, we don’t have the vector and we don’t have the pathogen.”
Avoiding Tick Encounters
The district’s tick-awareness work isn’t designed to alarm people, but to give them the information they need to stay safe.
“We want people to be aware, not to be afraid,” Smith said. “We want them to be informed so they can practice tick-bite prevention.”
According to Smith and Mitchell, who have collected thousands of ticks and have not been bitten yet, here’s what works:
- Wear long pants and tuck them into your socks. Tuck your shirt into your pants. If you do brush by a tick, it’s likely to stay outside your clothing where you can see it and remove it before it gets to your skin and embeds.
- Wear light-colored clothing – it makes ticks easier to spot.
- Wear EPA-approved insect repellents because those have been tested and shown to have significant repellent properties. Spray your boots and socks at least.
- Do tick checks at the end of each hike and full-body checks once you’re back inside. If you do find an embedded tick, use tweezers to grasp it as near your skin as possible and pull it straight out.
- If you’re hiking or camping with pets, do tick checks on them as well, removing any ticks the same way.
Learn more at the tick resources page of the Teton County Weed and Pest District website.