Beads of moisture condense on your smooth camouflage as you lean out of your tree stand, looking for that massive buck that has eluded you for all these years. Nothing, the woods are empty. A lone squirrel chatters away in the branches above you as you apply more scent eliminator and rattle those antlers together like an expert. Half an hour later, there he is! You freeze, stopping every muscle in its tracks. Still, the huge eight-point buck glances up at you and springs away, leaving nothing but a few oversized tracks in the mud. What went wrong?

You had no ghillie suit. Many game animals are colorblind, and very few have decent eyesight, able only to distinguish outlines and movement. Since you weren't moving, only one explanation is left: your outline. Any experienced bow hunter knows that your outline can be your worst enemy. This problem can be defeated by hiding behind a bush, but that hinders your ability to take a shot. When you get down to it, there is really only one solution - you need a ghillie suit.

Ghillie suits are the ultimate in camouflage, designed to work so well that not even humans are capable of detecting an experienced ghillie suit user. Soldiers in training have been known to stalk unseen within a few feet of a sniper.

In short, the ghillie suit is the ultimate concealment tool. But, when and where do you really need ultimate concealment? Obviously, a casual hiker doesn't need a ghillie suit, but what about the weekend hunter? Oddly, many people consider hunters in ghillie suits to be the hard-core type that spend weeks in the mountains to bag record game. However, ghillie suits are really designed to be the weekend hunter's friend. Even without a ghillie suit, anyone can bag a nice buck, if they have a few weeks to do it, but the casual hunter would be hard pressed to pull it off in a short weekend. Unless, of course, he was outfitted with the cloak of invisibility, otherwise known as a ghillie suit.

One might think that a rifle hunter would have no use for a ghillie suit, as you must wear bright orange during hunting season. However, as you may recall, most big game are colorblind, and that means that the orange isn't a problem. It's the solid outline. An orange ghillie vest on top of your regular ghillie suit may be just what you need to break up your outline. While you don't need to get particularly close to your game when hunting with a rifle, your range is still well under a deer's ability to see you.

Okay, so you're not a hunter. Why else would you need a ghillie suit? There are many reasons, but the most outstanding of them is paintballing. Any avid paintballer wouldn't be caught dead without his ghillie suit. Many would even say that, without their ghillie suit, they would be caught, and they would be ?dead.? In essence, paintballers face the same problems that hunters do: How to get close to your game without being spotted. The effective range of most paintball guns is well under fifty yards, and at that distance, you're faced with two options to avoid being seen. You can either hide behind something, listen to your opponent approaching and try to judge his distance and location before you pop up, and start blindly firing away. Or, you can get yourself a ghillie suit. With a ghillie suit, you can calmly watch your opponent approach to within ten yards.

Perhaps the biggest advantage ghillie suits offer in the area of paintballing is that most suits cover your helmet, and a few are bushy enough to cover your gun. Any paintballer, from amateur to experienced, knows that the number one thing that stands out in the woods is that pitch-black helmet, followed closely by the bulbous black hopper or black paintball gun. You can either spend the extra money to buy all these things in camouflage, or you can buy a ghillie suit.

I could go on, telling you about the military applications of ghillie suits and such, but I think you are getting the general idea. Ghillie suits, without a doubt, are the most effective form of concealment out there today; just ask anybody who has one.