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Peninsula Daily News Port Angeles, Washington Copyright 2000 Eric Rush www.ericrush.com |
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There are still some campgrounds in western states that allow you to scrounge campfire wood out of the surrounding forests, but most fee campgrounds, whether state or federal, sell wood in shrink-wrapped bundles. The price isn’t unreasonable, but it rankles to pay for something I have plenty of at home. We had room in the utility trailer for firewood, so we took some with us. We had only three campfires in three weeks. The first was at our first campsite in the Cascade Mountains a few hours from home. The woods were dry and signs listed fire restrictions, but small, carefully tended fires were allowed. Eastern Idaho was more than normally desolate. Grass and sagebrush were burned black and smoke hung in the air. Idaho had already had enough of fire by then. Our vacation trip wasn’t all camping, so campfires weren’t always an issue. When we did camp, though, fires in most places had been prohibited for some time. In others, bulletin boards sported crisp new signs. More than once, the campground hosts said the ban on fires had just gone into effect that day. More than once, it rained that very evening. When we pulled into an empty campground away from the interstate corridor in the Colorado Rockies, the host said he’d just received word of the fire ban, but that it wouldn’t go into effect until midnight. We had our second campfire in two weeks that evening. On our last night in Colorado, fires were not allowed where we camped. It rained hard enough that night to turn the clear mountain stream into churning mud. Another camper had brought firewood he couldn’t use and told me to take what I wanted. His split pine was better for fires than the wood I had in the trailer, so I accepted his offer and took some. We weren’t allowed fires at a campground in southern Wyoming, even though it was cool and rainy there at 10,500 feet, and even though my sandaled feet left tracks in frost as I walked to the lake in the morning to fish. We had our last fire of the trip the following night, still in Wyoming, and the only campers in a campground near South Pass. Someone had left firewood in our campsite, so we used that instead of our own. The strictest fire rules we encountered were in western Montana a few days before public lands in that area were shut down for all forms of recreation. In our one night in a campground next to the Madison River, not only were fires prohibited, so were gas grills and gasoline-powered generators. We couldn’t even light the water heater in our camper with a match, as access to the pilot is from outside. We lit it anyway. A retired man from Oregon had been in the campground several days to fish the fabled Madison. He was disappointed. Low, warm water from the hot, dry summer made fishing terrible. Most trout had been caught and released more than once so late in the season, and that made the fishing even worse. He said he’d stay until his camp trailer’s battery ran low, since he couldn’t run his generator to recharge it, and then he’d go back home for the excellent fishing across the road from his house. The Bitterroot Valley was choked with smoke, and for the first time on the trip, our eyes burned and breathing was unpleasant. I thought we’d quickly climb into cleaner air near Lolo Pass, but a large fire on the Idaho side only made it worse. Perhaps we could have had a campfire in Washington on the home stretch, but we didn’t stop to check. We drove hard and got home late in the afternoon, but early enough to unload the trailer and put the unburned wood, plus the extra, on the pile next to the house for winter.
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