A little fire is quickly trodden out; Which, being suffered, rivers cannot quench.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HENRY VI, PART 3
HEAVY RAINS CONTINUED to pour from the wild mountain clouds on our forlorn little tent all day. A little past noon we began to reach that elevated state of boredom known only by those who have been cooped up in a 5-by-7-foot space for 20 hours and have just about exhausted the eight basic ways of trying to sit or lie comfortably for long hours in a sleeping bag.
So we were delighted when the monotonous sound of descending water on the tent fly was suddenly and most unexpectedly supplemented by a barely discernible human voice crying to us from somewhere out there.
Now, many backpackers love to hike in the rain. In New England’s summers, you have to love hiking in the rain, because the good Lord of our hills sees to it that you get plenty of opportunity all summer long. The theory that the Almighty is practicing up for a new 40-day flood has its strongest empirical support in New England’s weather trends. We hear it can be wet in the Cascades too, and on the coastlines of Alaska and Washington State.
However, this was not summer. This was mid-March: temperatures in the mid-30s, six hours’ slog from the nearest road, every possibility that the chilling winter rain could be followed by temperatures plunging to zero or below—a situation, in short, where survival depends on keeping dry. Mad dogs and Englishmen may go out in India’s noonday sun, but they have sense enough to stay inside for New England’s winter rain, an invitation to hypothermia. We were holing up in our tent, prepared to sit it out and be alive to enjoy some more climbing when good weather returned.
But what was that voice out there?
Two bedraggled backpackers stumbled up to our tent, obvious candidates for an emergency. Blue jeans and summer boots, all soaking wet, revealed their inexperience at winter camping. When they discovered that the shelter they had hoped to find had been torn down two years earlier, they managed to string up a sagging tent and crawl inside.
The last communication we had with them before settling down for a long, wet night was when one of them asked us how we were cooking. It turned out that they had counted on starting a fire—a patently impossible achievement in their situation—and that all they had for dinner was two enormous steaks, destined to remain as raw as the day the poor cow died.
Here is the point of our story: Those two hikers, who so badly needed nourishment, went hungry (except for what we cooked them on our portable gas stove) because they had not brought food suitable for a backpacking trip under adverse conditions.
The predicament of those two was extreme, but it illustrates the modern backpacker’s paramount need for simple meals, lightweight and compact equipment, and complete self-sufficiency.
First off, reliance on fire building in the backwoods has become a highly questionable policy in light of the new environmental concerns. If we could be sure that everyone going into the backcountry would disperse to a different spot every night, know how to construct a small fire, and then leave no trace when they were through, maybe fires would be OK. But the deadwood supply has long been used up at the most commonly visited campsites, and the devastation wrought by irresponsible hatchet wielders is an ugly sore.
As long ago as 1893 the Appalachian Mountain Club was urging a halt to the cutting of firewood in the fragile area of the Presidential Range. Asking club members not to cut the scrub growth around newly constructed Madison Spring Hut, AMC’s councillor of improvements warned that “the growth is disappearing too rapidly.” If it looked bad in 1893, that worthy councilor should see some popular campsites today!
More than any other piece of the clean-camping mosaic, the discouragement of fires encounters a hard core of deep-felt resistance. The good old campfire dies hard; its emotional embers won’t go out. It has a deep meaning to many woodspeople, evoking time-hallowed (almost primeval) associations with warmth, light, security, and good fellowship. Ernest Thompson Seton, one of the patron saints of woodcraft, argued: “What is a camp without the evening campfire? It’s nothing but a place in the woods where some people have some things.”
It must be conceded that a good woodsman knows how to have his fire and leave the site without a trace. But when hundreds of novices get out their hatchets, the result is a scene like that of so many backwoods shelters during the backpacking boom: miles from the road, yet surrounded by a wasteland of hacked stumps. Even 20 years ago, when you camped at Chimney Pond in Maine’s Baxter Park, you had to walk about half a mile to find any deadwood on the forest floor. Deadwood performs important ecological functions as it decays back into the soil, and when armies of campers burn it all as it falls, the forest is deprived. Also, many inexperienced fire builders don’t appreciate the risks of underground fires that smolder for days under the duff and may spring to conflagration long after the fire builder has left, thinking he has put out all his embers.
Harry Roberts, former editor of Wilderness Camping (no longer in print), labeled campfires as “ethically indefensible in heavily used areas.” In high dudgeon, Roberts cried in his excellent treatise, Movin’ Out:
Look at the trees! They’re scalped up to eight feet off the ground. And those saplings. My God, they’re chewed off a foot above ground! The poor, spindly stumps catch your boots and send you sprawling. Every twenty feet there’s the curdled, half-charred remnant of somebody’s cooking fire, adorned with unburnt poly bags and unburnable aluminum foil. The place looks like the morning after Shiloh; all because a large number of jackasses didn’t give a damn about the environment or what the next guy would find.
A subtle and sensitive argument against fires concerns their effect on the relationship between the camper and the night. Fires have a hypnotic effect—that’s part of their attraction. They draw your eyes inward and you sit, gazing into the flickering flame and glowing embers. Meanwhile, you’ve lost contact with the woods around you, the stars above you, the wildlife (which gives your fire a wide berth), and the silence and sounds of nocturnal nature. The campfire is its own uniquely satisfying world—but it tends to isolate you from the larger natural world around you.
We’d like to see this antifire ethic spread more generally. For example, many public campgrounds are doing the cause no good by making firewood available to the public. People should be encouraged to make the transition to gas cookstoves, not indulged in the phony fantasy of building obsolete fires from trucked-in wood, sometimes procured from local lumberyards.
Some groups that bill themselves as educational still use a completely unacceptable volume of fire in the backcountry. We hear of schools that send out gangs of high-school-age kids to “experience” the backwoods life, complete with wood fires night after night, year after year, usually in the same backwoods locations. The impact on the backcountry must be tragic. But worse than that is the “educational” effect, the message sent to all those kids that it’s OK to burn every scrap of deadwood in the area, that the modern way to camp necessarily means fires. What an inexcusable lesson to give the rising generation, a generation that should be developing a careful sense of stewardship and personal responsibility for reducing our impact on the overcrowded and overused backcountry.
The Green Mountain Club of Vermont has largely taken the woodstoves out of its shelters on the Long Trail after a bitter history of fires burning down some of the fine old shelters and after observing the widening circle of destruction to the surrounding trees. It is interesting to note that the club encountered almost no resistance to this policy. Most of today’s backpackers understand.
A sophisticated argument against stoves and for fires is that stoves are not environmental saints either: They run on various derivatives of petroleum, which must be painfully plundered from the earth’s dwindling resources to the accompaniment of pipelines bisecting caribou migration routes, oil spills on coastal marine life, and Gulf Wars.
This is a legitimate argument worth heeding. Wood is a renewable resource. At our home, on a 27-acre woodlot, we cook and heat and sugar entirely on our own wood, and 27 acres proves sufficient to support such activity indefinitely. That is, the forest produces deadwood, through normal turnover, at almost precisely the rate at which we burn it to support our low-consumption lifestyle. This marvelous balance, however, is never going to be achieved at popular camping areas in the backcountry, not in the post-backpacking boom era. But it is also true, and disturbing, that almost all portable stoves add to the demand for fossil fuels, which we are all collectively using up at an unacceptable rate.
What it comes down to is a choice between making a minor contribution to faraway oil markets versus a major, immediate, and disastrous impact on the backcountry in a place that is here and now, the essential backdrop to our wilderness experience. So we vote for the portable stove. Let’s cure a problem that the backpacking community can single-handedly solve. Then, as voters and citizens, perhaps we can support those who are seeking a rational public policy on the much larger question of depletion of limited resources on this beleaguered planet.
Among those who concede the undesirability of backwoods campfires as a regular way of life, there are still those who believe that everyone should practice how to build a campfire in case of emergency. We demur even here. The emergency use of fire is highly questionable for a variety of reasons.
There are rare circumstances in which an emergency fire could save a life, no question about that. So it’s probably desirable for backpackers to know how to build one. But practice isn’t necessary. Building an emergency fire falls roughly into the same category as treating a snakebite or performing an emergency tracheotomy on the trail. Furthermore, like performing a tracheotomy with a penknife, it has been done but should be undertaken only as a last resort.
Why is fire building of so little use in emergencies?
1. If getting warm is essential, starting a fire will be little help. An outdoor fire is an extremely inefficient heat source, even for the one side of you that gets any warmth. Great quantities of fuel are required to produce a negligible amount of useful BTUs.
2. The modern backpacker usually carries a good sleeping bag, and he’s much better off inside that bag than out. Inside, the considerable heat his own body generates is retained.
3. If the backpacker gets a fire going, he should then get into his bag anyway. Once inside, how can he tend a fire effectively?
4. If hot food or drink is his greatest need, it is much more efficient to use his cookstove.
5. If he is above treeline, fire building is a useless art because there will be insufficient burnable material at hand.
6. Most emergencies in which a fire is alleged to be needed occur in winter. If the novice starts a fire on a 6-foot snow cover, he’ll soon have a pit several feet deep with the fire at the bottom, where it will furnish no heat but plenty of smoke. It’s not easy to cook anything way down there either.
7. If a backpacker has the energy, tools, and daylight to amass many large logs to construct a fire platform on the snow, he should probably use his time and energy instead to do something of more lasting benefit—like walking out.
If you should be caught in a wintertime emergency without tent, sleeping bag, or stove, you might want to get a fire going. But you would probably be better off using the natural protection of deep snow by digging a snow cave or trench, if conditions permit, or burrowing under a blowdown, where natural caves can occur.
Often you hear people cite Jack London’s marvelous short story, “To Build a Fire,” recalling how a backwoodsman died because he couldn’t keep a fire going, despite great effort. We like to point out that while the man wasted his time on futile fire-building efforts, the dog in the story very sensibly devoted his energies to walking out. The man died; the dog lived. Where’s the moral there?
One of the authors was once caught in a somewhat desperate situation at –35°F with winds strong enough to knock him over. When camp was finally established, there was a struggle to keep a Svea stove going long enough to melt snow to supply badly needed hot liquids. The idea of getting out of his down bag long enough to start a fire would have been patently absurd.
So why burn down the woods practicing fires that aren’t really needed, won’t keep you warm, and are out of step with today’s environmental concerns? Read up on how to build an emergency fire, because you just might need to, just as you might need to perform an emergency tracheotomy. But as for practicing—keep the penknife away from our throats, and leave the trees alone too.
In making the transition to the compact, portable gas stove, we’ve found we don’t really miss that old campfire—in fact, we wouldn’t want one now. We prefer to get along with no smoke in our eyes, no soot on our pots, no scouring the forest for deadwood, no setup and breakdown time, no nighttime beacon of blazing light that makes the stars hard to see and scares off animal life. It’s a matter of what you grow accustomed to.