No-Touch Camo Face Mask for Hunters
Russ Chastain 07.10.14
If you’re like me, you know that covering your face while hunting is good practice, even when it’s inconvenient. Wild animals can learn to recognize the face of a predator, and a light-colored blob like this white guy’s face can really stand out in the woods.
To stay concealed, I started using a face mask decades ago, but I never did like it. My glasses would fog up, my face would get hot, the mask would irritate my skin, the elastic straps would lose their stretchiness or slide off the back of my head and cut into my ears, or something else would happen to make me unhappy. I found myself getting lazy and leaving my face uncovered, which I’m sure led to me getting busted more than once.
A few years ago, I tried camo face paint, and on that hunt I took a deer at a range of a few feet. It never saw me, and I was pleased. I started using face paint on most of my hunts.
But that, too, can be a bummer. It smears, it rubs off on my hands when I scratch an itch or wipe sweat from my face, and, well, it freaks people out. Applying it and washing my face at least once (usually twice) a day gets old.
So when I saw the BunkerHead System, “featuring the only no-touch face mask,” I was instantly interested.
You attach two “bunker clips” to the bill of a cap (so you can keep using your favorite cap, if you have one) and attach the mask to the clips. The top edge of the mask is supported by a bendable rubber-covered wire. In other words, the wire acts as a curtain rod and the mask hangs from it like a curtain. This keeps the mask from touching your face, and you can adjust the distance to keep it close to your face, or farther away.
Much of my hunting takes place in hot weather, when I’d love to have the mask away from my face, and in cold weather, the ability to move it in close could be a real bonus.
Another plus is that you can just cover your face while leaving your ears and neck uncovered if you wish. I often strain to hear things in the woods and don’t want a mask preventing me from hearing things–and in hot weather I want as little cover as I can get away with. But when you do want to cover your neck and ears, you can use the BunkerHead Hoodie attachment.
(Photo courtesy of BunkerHead LLC)
Heck, they even say that you can stick leaves and such in the elastic between the bunker clips to make your cap camo instantly 3-D–or use the strap to store your sunglasses.
The BunkerHead system can be had in several different Mossy Oak® patterns and fabrics. Perhaps best of all, this stuff is made by a small family business, right here in the good ol’ USA. Hopefully, I’ll be wearing one when I hit the woods to hunt deer in a few months. You can order yours from BunkerHead’s website.
