Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Exquisite aromas

It's been almost sixty years since my nostrils thrilled to the exquisite aroma of genuine, pure sandalwood oil (Navy-issue to lube the gate of my big Simplex 35mm projector). But Boy! do I remember it! It's the most exquisite aroma that I've ever smelled � miles beyond even good ol' Hoppe's #9.

When I lived in Saudi Arabia, I tried to find a source for some frankincense and myrrh but couldn't find anyone who even knew what I was talking about. They must have different names for 'em now, and I didn't know the modern terms for 'em. So I'm doomed to die curious about 'em, I guess.

What are the most exquisite aromas that you've ever smelled?

A freshly fired paper 12 ga shell from my Grandfather's Model 97 when I was a wee one with him on a pheasant hunt in eastern South Dakota! Whenever I smell it that day comes back as clear as can be!

the cold-enhanced smell of old balsam needles that came out of the boxes of Christmas lights and ornaments when we would get them down out of the attic when I was a kid

just-fired shotgun shells (especially paper)

My wife's cornbread cooking.

One of my favorites, too � since the mid-1930s, from Dad's and Grandfather's twenty-gauge L C Smith doubles. Heady stuff for a five-year-old bashing through the briers behind 'em and picking up their empties.

Hard to be the aroma of the old paper hulls.
I would say for me though the best is the smell of water when you are so hot your eyeballs are fried and so thirsty your spitting cotton.

BCR

The frankincense and myrrh burning in the brazers at the entrances of the Souq in Tunis and the incense that was burning in a temple in Pakistan. I have frankincense and myrrh here but they don't smell the same as what I remember from Tunis. One from way back, a printed sheet fresh out of the mimeograph machine

The back of the suburban this weekend with 3 dead boar in it....delightful

Yes. It's easy to understand why those several generations ahead of us had a fondness for sandalwood. My grandmother had a sandlewood box, but it went another direction in the family. Smell is one of those things that is hardwired straight into the brain, and certain aromas will can bring vivid memories to life.

For some reason any of the fresh cut woods have always been pleasant to me. I also love the coffee section in the stores, but can't stand to drink it at all.

Another one that's hard to beat is the smell of a dusty yard that's just been sprinkled by a brief shower.

and let's not forget "the smell of napalm in the morning"

Freshly cut alfalfa or Red Clover. A humid, northern Wisconsin hardwoods forest in the fall.. Hyacinths.. Prunus Padus in May.. Old, hometown bakeries..

And I just KNOW Cheryl Burke would have an awesome scent!! But I also know I'll never get close enough for a sniff..

fresh, ripe oranges(goes with the memory trigger thing 1minute said) and rain storms.....

Ohh yesssss. And drought time. Eyes scaning the sky day after burning dry day. Then a cloud and maybe you can see that gray veil hanging under it and maybe not but you can smell the rain way off there. Just smell it and try to suck it in, draw it to you. Smells so cool and good.

BCR

This one will probably get some people to shaking their heads, but it's my story and I'm sticking with it!

Several years ago I heard a story on Paul Harvey IIRC about a group of people that were skunk smell experts. I guess that there are like 12 distinct (don't quote me on the particulars), but a bunch of kinds of skunk smells anyways. People collect it and perfumes are made from it.

I always thought it sort of smelled neat before I ever heard that story, but then I started paying more attention. Too much skunk smell is just too much and it's pretty gross, but when you're just driving down a country road and can just catch a light whiff of the odor in the breeze, it is a pretty smell in a way.

I still don't want to smell a dog covered with skunk that want's in my house or in my pickup though -- That is just WAY too much of a good thing!!

My grandmother's kitchen when she's cooking homemade light rolls.
My daughter's hair.
My wife after she gets out of a hot shower.
Oak firewood smoke drifting from the cabin, on a late November evening, as you make your way back after a day deer hunting.
Spring rain on a VA Blue Ridge trout stream.
Fresh cut, first cut, hayfields in late May.
Coffee cooked next to a backcountry campfire.
Seafood boiling over a driftwood blaze.
The smell from a fired .22LR in the early morning squirrel woods.

Babies

Puppy breath

Unless you are from the Southwest you won't know, but the smell of creosote bush after a rain out in the desert is powerful good! Ditto on the 12 ga shells, one of the greatest. It is too bad a lot of todays kids will never smell fresh 12 ga. shells.

� Late one summer might in 1956, I was driving on a 'way-back logging road high in the Cabinet range when a newly born fawn blocked my way. Its ma was snorting from the blackness of the high bank above the road cut, but the little fellow � still showing the lick marks where the doe had licked the amnion off it � was too wobbly on its feet to follow her up the steep bank.

I left the head lights on but killed the engine, got out, and easily caught the fawn in my arms.

I'd read often that new-born fawns had no odor. I had to see for myself. I stuck my nose into its soft flank �

� and smelled, very faintly, a very clean, very woodsy, indescribably wonderful odor.


� One fall day in 1954, I couldn't go squirrel-hunting with my partner Wyatt, but he later brought me a very special treat. He handed me the hawk that he'd just shot and bade me smell its breast feathers. I did so � and was rewarded with an unforgettable aroma � faint, clean, woodsy, like nothing else that I'd ever smelled.

Desert sage, here.