Camo 101

 Ghost Camo Pro-Staff and Industry Writer; Jeff Murray (www.moonguide.com)

What is the main purpose of camouflage? 
Most people, including mainline manufacturers, think a good camo pattern should “blend” into the environment.  This, in turn, should allow hunters to “look” like their surroundings.  This helps, of course, but it will not fool big game consistently.  That’s why Ghost patterns are different.  They flat out work because they accomplish the true objective of camouflage: Ghost patterns disguise the human outline.  Indeed, what causes a deer or elk or pronghorn or moose or bear or turkey to give you a double-take is your human form – you have a round head on top of a vertical, not horizontal, body.  It is not a natural part of wild America.  And it must be disguised or game will pick you off.

We fool game with the science of sight: The animals we love to pursue have keen peripheral vision, but they have relatively poor depth perception.  Their “monocular vision” results from the location of their eyes – on the side of their head, not on their forehead.  Ghost patterns take advantage of this with a consistent theme: Our camouflage preys on the limitations of monocular vision.  How?  With all of our patterns we incorporate a light background into a radically dissimilar foreground.  Then we add detail – leaves, limbs, branches – that allows us to create hard, deep, dark shadows.  These erratic shadows are what animals end up focusing on.  Stated simply, when you put any of our patterns to work, big game sees shadows instead of a human form.  Again, that’s the primary goal of any camouflage: break up the human outline. 

Because hunters face five distinct terrain types in North America, we offer five unique patterns.  One or two simply will not work.  If there were a universal pattern, it would have been discovered long ago.  As you consider this, consider a simple test.  Compare any of our patterns at, say, 75 yards with a competitor’s.  You’ll find that ours will simply vanish (because of our use of shadows), and theirs will pop out (because they’re cluttered and too dark).  We call it the “blob effect.”  While other patterns may have shelf appeal, they aren’t going to make you disappear.

Prairie Ghost
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Prairie Ghost is the ultimate Western camouflage.  It is designed for areas with low-growing vegetation and direct sunlight.  Prairie features muted natural colors, predominantly vertical lines, and distinctive prairie coloration.  It is the ideal pattern for grassland, sage and desert hunts. 

Ridge Ghost
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Pull the vanishing game in conifer forests with Ridge Ghost. Where underbrush is limited and sunlight varies from extremely bright areas to areas of shade and dark shadows, you need a completely different combination. Here, standing trees and are often punctuated with deadfalls and new growth with vivid colors.  Ridge Ghost revolves around a linear pattern with soft browns and greens against an open natural background.  Ridge is equally at home on a mountain elk hunt or a pine plantation deer hunt.

River Ghost
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Arguably the most versatile pattern in the camo industry, River Ghost disguises the human outline in many terrain types. However, Ghost is especially effective where mainstream patterns fail – treestand-hunting in small-diameter trees and in trees with no leaves.  That’s right, now you can blend into the background when there isn’t any!  That includes light-barked trees such as aspen, beech, basswood and even birch.  And it also includes willows and cottonwoods.  “I mix and mash Ghost patterns to match the conditions,” says noted outdoor writer Jeff Murray.  “But if I had to rely on only one pattern, it would be River Ghost.  It’s without peer.”
 
Northwoods Ghost
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Deer and oaks go together like mice and cheese.  With Northwoods we take our philosophy of using plenty of distinguished vertical lines – with browns and tans – so deer cannot see past the gray background.  Northwoods’ erratic black lines, which outline the tans, allow deer to focus there, not on you.  If you ever hunt in hardwood forests, where the trees are dark and the ground is littered with leaves, Northwoods is for you.

Snow Ghost
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Winter completely changes the landscape in much of the country.  After a great deal of experimentation, we discovered that Ghost Snow works best with key aspects of our highly successful prairie pattern.  (Recall that monocular vision makes it a lot tougher to distinguish vertical lines than horizontal lines.)  So we use muted natural colors on a “snow” background along with subtle vertical patterns.