Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Smells from the past..

The smell of my mom's homemade cinnamon rolls fresh out of the oven. Fortunately, my wife is the only one that learned that recipe before my mom passed away.
The smell of hot brakes, hot clutches and hot tires in the pits at a race track.
The smell of a doug fire/pine forest in the spring

Noxema
The salt marsh
Scrapple
Two stroke exhaust
Hospitals
Thanksgiving

Since I've made some of my living in the pines I have a lot of those scents.

The scent of really really dry pine straw in the summer when it's 103F out. Almost smells burnt.

The smell of really wet and musty pine straw out in the woods, almost smells like mildew.

The sickly sweet smell of rotting sugar cane husk. Growing up in sugar cane country come the late fall and early spring you smelled this one a lot. Once you smell it you never forget it.

The smell of my first son after I gave him his first "bath" in the hospital waiting room.

The smell of my Father's wood working shop when he was cutting walnut, the wood he most often used.

The stench of my maternal grandmother's kitchen, hell the entire house, when making baccala soup.

Coal fired locomotive, or tangy aroma of oil fired locomotive.
Water soluble cutting oil in band saw.
Creosoted railroad ties and trestle timbers on a hot day.
Kerosene lanterns and stoves.
Hay loft freshly loaded with oat, timothy and alfalfa hay.
Absorbine Veterinary Liniment.
Aroma of a tack store with new Levis, boots, saddles, bridles and harness.
The aroma of a horse bathed in Vetrolin Liniment as the cooler comes off.
Neatsfoot oil, saddle soap and shoe polish.
Aroma of fired IMR-4198.
Hot dog like aroma of dynamite smoke and nitroglycerin based shotgun powder.
Old Spice.
Hoppies No 9 they should sell little blotter paper deodorizers to hang in the gun safe and dangle from the rear view mirror.
Aroma of homemade bread baking.
Drifting aroma of food vendors and popcorn stands at the fairgrounds.
Coffee when the stopper comes out of the Thermos bottle.

Salt marsh..grew up on one.
Cedar bog
Stuffed cabbage cooking
Cam-2 in a muscle car
puppy breath
wet dogs

smell of a Greyhound or Continental Trailways station, beaver caster, and a branding iron hitting the hide

Tar. We used to use tar for a lot of stuff. Olsen for tarring the fishing nets, tar and chip roads, oiling down dirt roads, coal tar, all kinds of stuff. Not harly any anymore. Not PC, I guess.

Grandads Christmas cigars and roast duck.

Every Christmas he always had to have cigars after all the gifts had been opened, every adult male was given a cigar regardless. Didn't matter to him if you normally smoked or not every adult male had to at least light a cigar and have a puff. His other tradition was roast duck for Christmas dinner.

I'm glad I'm not the only paper cartridge smoke addict here too, I always loved that smell.

The fog over a good duck swamp, it has a different smell to other fog, or maybe it's just the excitement makes it smell different.

Torn earth, wild boar, blood and dogs all mingled together. I hunted wild pigs with dogs from the time I was 12 till almost 30 and the combination of all those smells will always be with me.
Also the smell of our old dog food bath, we used to get road kill animals, sheep or goats, sweet potatoes and rice, mix it all together in an old cast iron bath full of water and build a fire under it, boil it for an hour or two then scoop it out for the dogs. Not a particularly pleasant smell but it holds good memories of all the dogs and the kennels, watching pups grow and become a good dog (the ones that wouldn't become good dogs didn't get to grow for long, guess we were harder on animals back then and nicer to people)

The smell of a shearing shed after a week of shearing sheep, a mix of sheep manure, lanolin, sweat and DB draught beer (the best beer ever made when you've been working hard)

The smell of camphor wood always reminds me of my grand mothers old chest, it was full of hand made frilly lace and my grand fathers hand knotted doillies (those lacey things old folks used to put under their ornaments).
My grandfather was a perfectionist, he'd spend night after night sitting with a big ball of fine cotton thread knotting those things into intricate designs. I remember he had about two months work into a big table cloth when he noticed he'd made a mistake. He never unpicked any of it to fix it, just balled it up and threw it in the fire then started again. He was like that with everything, no patience for fixing mistakes but all the patience in the world when it came to doing something right first time. He was an amazing craftsman, he used to make wooden aircraft propellers during WWII. They were so finely balanced a fly was enough to throw the weight out. He did the finest inlay work with native NZ timbers, creating all sorts of scenes using the different colours, grains and textures of the timbers to create depth and contrast.

Sorry for taking this off track a bit, remembering the smells made me a bit nostalgic.

"Hoppies No 9 they should sell little blotter paper deodorizers to hang in the gun safe and dangle from the rear view mirror."

Wrangler, they do make 'em! We sell 'em at the shop. But IMHO they aren't very strong....

BN

Hoppes # 9: Instantly transports me to the plywood table in the basement where Dad taught me how to clean a .22. And my wife LOVES the smell, too!

Exhaled smoke from a Viceroy cigarette: I hate smoke, but I can still smell 1973 in my grandma's kitchen, not long before she gave up smoking.

A corn field in late July or early August: Whatever happens with the esters as the corn matures smacks me hard saying, "Summer's on its way out, & school's starting soon."

A standing rib roast after about 4 hours the oven: I started this Christmas tradition in my home. I feel fat after just one whiff!

Kolaches coming out of the oven: takes me to gorgeous spring days visiting Grandma in Southeast Texas.

Pecan-smoked brisket & link sausage: Ditto.

Evergreens on a mountain hillside: to this flatlander, that smell tells me I still need to rethink where I've chosen to live.

Autumn leaves on a forest path: a smell that tells me God goes out of His way every day to show me how much I'm loved.

Diesel fumes from a charter bus: takes me back to my drum corps days.

First grass cutting of the season: intoxicating.

A campfire: warmth, safety, perseverance, family, friendship.

FC

Cedar Swamp

Hoppes 9

"Grandpa's Basement" - Kind of a musty, oiled, old stuff smell

Beaver Castor

That first wiff when you open up a whitetail on a frosty morning

WB Cut chew

An old diesel sub has it's own unique smell - due to the oils used by the USN at the time.. And a certain oil sold by Brownell's smells exactly like it.. Every time I use it, I'm reminded of the service..

Burning leaves - which used to be very common within the city when I was a kid.. Around late October the smell of smoke from burning leaves was prevalent.. Of COURSE we can't have all that stuff NOW!!!

So many smells that bring back good memories.
Fresh fired paper shotgun hulls.
Fresh turned earth. I quit row cropping thirty years ago but the smell of the earth turning back from the middle busters stays with me yet.
Branding iron on cow hide.
Fresh picked cotton when you bury your nose in the bale wagon.
Muscadine grapes when you come up on them unexpected in the woods.
Cooking syrup. Wood smoke and hot sugar

I'll pile on with the old paper Super-X shotgun shells. Also love the smell of the sage prairie after a hail storm and the smell of branding day.

The smell of leaves in the fall, cornfields when you walk through them pheasant hunting, papershot shells.

We had a gunsmith here who worked out of his garage for 35+ years.

Re-barreling was his specialty but he did it all.

His shop had a distinctive smell of lathe oil, pipe smoke, walnut, and bluing chemicals.

He died in 1992.

Three years later I was looking at a pre-64 M70 that had been re-chambered to .30 Gibbs. Guy selling it was out of work and had a family to feed.

I picked it up and it smelled of that same combination of lathe oil,pipe smoke, walnut,and bluing chemicals.

Last thing that I needed was .30 Gibbs, but I gave the gent his asking price without any further bargaining.

RIP Mr. Baker. Thanks for the afternoons spent in your shop.

Old Spice or Bay Rum-dad.
Hai Karat-high school, a TR-3 and Boones Farm.
Old Enlish-basic training, 1972.

Paper fresh off the mimeograph machine.

Ammonia used (or spilled) in a blue line machine.

Looks like Hoppes and paper shotgun shells are the winners here. For me it's Hoppes. I takes me back to when I was about nine years old and fascinated with all my Grandfather's guns and the fun I had cleaning them. He had me rub gun oil on the stocks and it was many years later that I learned how wrong that was. I think of him every time I open the Hoppes. Mom's fresh baked bread is a smell I sure miss. Me and my brothers could eat it almost as fast as she could bake it. Good post. Ken