In a recent post about what feels like an overall decline at Cabela's outdoor stores, I mentioned that they were showing more varieties of camouflage clothing than I had ever seen – although deficient in warm winter hats.
But you need those varieties if you are going to match your camouflage clothing to your part of the country! (Source)
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Click this one too, I dare you
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What this tells me as a Southwesterner is that the "Six-Color Desert" pattern, also known as "chocolate chip," is a good bet almost year around. I started using it for waterfowling when I realized in the 1980s that the Woodland pattern or its civilian variants were mostly too dark for southern Colorado marshes. (Simple khaki would better than those.)
Six-Color lost favor with the Army when they realized that while it worked in the American Southwest, it was less than perfect in places like Kuwait, Iraq, and Syria. So we gave away boatloads of it to our valuable allies and switched to the Three-Color "coffee stain" pattern. (Here is a YouTube on the history of the Six-Color Desert pattern.)
As they say, it was developed for the American Southwest. I like it for brushy or scrubby enviroments too. And remember that 80 percent of camouflage is holding still and sticking to shadows as much as possible.
I wonder what patterns people wore to the Camouflage Cotillion last month in Eden, Texas. Unfortunately, I was passing through Eden the day before, or I would have checked it. For research purposes.
From what I hear, if you go to one of those Texas private-hunting ranches and don't wear camo, you will have committed a social blunder. But camouflage only really matters if your quarry can see color — in other words, birds and humans.
Otherwise, it is a cultural statement.
