The Lost art of making campfires

By M. John Fayhee

Even though I was camping alongside a then-little-used section of trail (nothing in Colorado is little used now), and even though I hadn’t seen anyone else in half-a-day, I still found myself furtively, guiltily even, looking over my shoulder as I gathered a few armfuls of downed pine branches with the idea of committing Mortal Sin.

This is was in the ’90s, and I was about 200 miles into a 43-day thru-hike of the Colorado Trail. Though it may not seem like all that long ago, the CT was still a fairly nascent enterprise. Several sections remained unbuilt, many sections remained unmarked and the first official guidebook was still a work-in-progress.

I had parked myself in a dark stand of pines along a small creek. The actual tread that the CT followed was then a secondary route to the summit of Mt. Yale, one of Colorado’s famed Fourteeners. Evening was falling, and it was midweek, so, at some point, I determined that the coast was clear, that there would be no passersby to witness my recalcitrant behavior. So, I made a little circle of river rocks, gathered a small handful of dried pine needles, made a little teepee of needles and tinder I had collected, and, like the inner Boy Scout I will always be, I pulled out my bottle of white gas and poured a few thimblefuls onto the organic material. Out came the butane lighter and — voila! — instant primal gratification

Though I had been on the trail for several weeks, I had not once built a fire. Part of the reason was that it was the middle of summer, with daylight extending well beyond the hour at which my tired carcass was inclined to slide into my Clip-2 for a well-deserved journey into the Land of Nod.

But the main reason I had not built a fire on that hike was that, at about the same time the Colorado Trail was becoming a physical reality, the groundwork for an organization that came to be known in 1993 as Leave No Trace was being laid. Part and parcel of the movement that morphed into LNT was the very justified perception that fire use in the backcountry was fast getting out of control, and that situation was exacerbated by the fact that, every year, more and more people were venturing out into the boonies with boonie-based perceptions that went all the way back to mankind’s “Quest for Fire” days: You’re camping in the backcountry, you build a fire, no questions asked, except maybe: Should it be a big fire or a REALLY big fire?”

But … all those fires began making a measurable two-fold impact on the environment: First, many popular camping areas were being completely denuded of downed wood, which inarguably is a necessary component for soil regeneration. And, second, fire rings were proliferating like hamsters on crank, to the point (as any of us can attest) that some otherwise primo campsites contained eight fire rings within about 10 feet. And, in addition to being butt-ugly (as well as being magnets for all manner of detritus left by the more bubba-ish among us), every single one of those fire rings resulted in a degree of heat-based sterilization that rendered the proximate soil absolutely inert for enough years that is was essentially classified as biologically DEAD.

So, LNT rationally opted to include in their original “tenets” an admonition to at least think about your fire use.  The fire component of the LNT scripture has been mellowed-down over the years, and now reads:

MINIMIZE CAMPFIRE IMPACTS

• Campfires can cause lasting impacts to the backcountry. Use a lightweight stove for cooking and enjoy a candle lantern for light.

• Where fires are permitted, use established fire rings, fire pans or mound fires.

• Keep fires small. Only use sticks from the ground that can be broken by hand. Burn all wood and coals to ash, put out campfires completely, then scatter cool ashes.

As benign as those admonitions are, and as necessary as they might be, the result became interpreted by many angelic backcountry travelers to mean that, under no circumstances, ought people make fire. “Campfires” became a bonafide backcountry bad word/concept, and those who dared put match to tinder in the boonies were deemed infidels who deserved to be burned at the metaphoric stake.

But, LNT  though often a tad on the self-righteous side, is operated by savvy people who understood from the beginning that, once you classify something as “bad,” you have to come up with a concomitant “good” to fill the vacuum you just created. Thus, in addition to ascribing sinful status to fires and those inclined to build fires, LNT and its converts offered a behavioral alternative: enjoying the night sans fire. We suddenly began reading articles in outdoor magazines about the joy and rapture of staring up into the un-fire-polluted night sky or sitting alone in the woods listening for animal sounds that otherwise might not be perceived were we all gathered around the warming flames laughing and telling stories.

It was a brilliant bit of PR that eventually resulted in a predictable fundamentalism that manifest itself pretty much at the exact moment I lit my little pile of white-gas-enhanced sticks there on the side of the Colorado Trail. The instant the first puffs of smoke began wafting their way through the trees, I heard voices coming down from Mt. Yale, and the first syllables I discerned were: “Some asshole’s got a fire going!” — uttered with the same intonation that a Frenchman might utilize while observing wine being poured from a box. Shit. I couldn’t believe it. I briefly considered quickly dousing the flames, but that would have meant using water I had just spent 15 minutes filtering. I sat there next to my diminutive fire awaiting some manner of negative reinforcement.

As the flames began to crackle in earnest, the group became visible. There were about 15 of them, and every single one was a goddamned John Denver clone, right down to the wire-rimmed spectacles. And every one of them looked at me like I was a giant turd standing there with my turd hands in my turd pockets, trying for all the world to look simultaneously innocent and indignant, in a giant turd kind of way. As they passed in seeming slow motion, no one said a word; they just glowered. I have spent most of the last 15 years wondering why I did not react by smearing ash on my face and running after them waving a mighty wand of fire and threatening to set them ablaze, except that, well, at that point, none of my potential mighty wands of fire had evolved past the point of being just little sticks that were still trying to decide if they were going to go ahead and burn of their own carbon-based volition or whether they going to very soon require additional quantities of my limited white gas stash.

In more intervening years than I care to accept or even ponder, the whole concept of making campfires in the backcountry has dwindled like rain-soaked ashes. Sure, the myriad variations on the bubba theme still build fires without compunction, and those we now classify as self-propelled outdoor recreationists sometimes build them in existing fire pits, like we’re supposed to, while car camping. But, these days, if you light a fire in the backcountry, you are an anomaly and maybe even an outcast. Definitely a giant turd. Most of us, most times, simply admire the stars sans fire, like good little boys and girls, and retire early. And that’s fine except that, in the interim, a vital backcountry skill has been essentially lost. Even many of those who have never heard of Leave No Trace, and wouldn’t care if they had, have no idea how to build fires these days. It is generally a comedy of errors that would have our forefathers shaking their heads to eyeball people attempting to coax the inner energy from wood into the rapid energy release we call fire. I remember once sitting in a Forest Service campground with a buddy watching a man trying to get one of those little plastic-wrapped bundles of firewood you can buy at the supermarket for $7.50 to light by applying a match directly to the side of a quarter-split piece of pine. No newspaper, no dried leaves, no tinder, no kindling, not even any white gas. Just a fairly substantial piece of pine, a match and a frustrated man complaining to his embarrassed wife and his expectant kids about the poor quality of the wood he had just spend good money on. I did not know whether to laugh or cry. But I did realize at that moment that, when the lights start going out in the next century, fire-makers will once again be high priests of magic and light, and we will have come full circle as a species. The story-telling will then commence anew.

Part of building a fire is knowing which woods burn clean and make good coals and which woods burn smoky and fast. Part of it is understanding the concept of draft as it applies to rapid oxygenation. Part of it is understanding that fire needs to breathe, just like a person. Part of it is understanding the misconception that the only way to stoke a fire is from below. And part of it is understanding that tending a fire is like tending a relationship: Just because it starts hot and strong doesn’t mean it won’t fizzle into lukewarm nothingness when you least expect it, when your attention wanders, even for a moment.

It wasn’t that long ago that every single human being on the planet could build a fire as naturally as he or she could be dazzled by the brilliance of the stars. My mother’s family grew up cooking on a woodstove in the tattered remnants of war-torn England, and they continued to do so well into the ’60s, long after my Mom bailed on the UK and came to the New World. Yet, here we are, at a point where, for instance, several summers ago, I was camping with one of the most prominent outdoor photographers in the West, and, as I started to gather wood for a small fire, he tried to veto the endeavor by saying how much he hated smelling like smoke. If there is one thing that has tied humanity together during the entire evolutionary path of our species, it was that we — every one of us no matter our social station — went through our entire lives smelling like smoke and being comforted by that smell.

Now, lest I incur the righteous wrath of the LNT apostles, I’ll state for the record that there are certainly times when campfires are inappropriate, like when there’s a paucity of downed wood and when you run the risk of pissing off a herd of John Denver clones. But, that caveat articulated, is there anything better than sitting around a nice campfire blazing away in an existing fire ring, fueled by little pieces of wood small enough that they can be broken by hand and sipping Wild Turkey and/or tequila with friends old and/or new while swapping stories as the crickets chirp in the background? Is there anything on this entire plane of corporeal, sensory-based existence better than making love next to the glowing embers? No! A thousand times, NO!

I once related the anti-campfire-ism running rampant in Colorado to my chum Jim Stiles, publisher extraordinaire of the famed Canyon Country Zephyr. His stunned reaction was to ask: If you can’t have a campfire, why go on living?

Why indeed?

The art of making fire is not totally lost, just mostly lost. There are people in the Himalaya and the Andes who can build fire where there is no wood, only rock and ice. There are people in the jungles who can light wood that is saturated clear down to the molecular level. There are people in Ireland who can make fire from earth. And the Tarahumara Indians in Copper Canyon can lay the groundwork for a fire so well that, one second, there’s this anarchy-looking pile of rubble, and, with one touch of torch that looks like it’s falling out of the sky, there is all-of-a-sudden the kind of fire that you can dance around and from which new religions are born and old ones go up in smoke.

MG