No Campfires Campaign

My idea for a public service announcement about the dangers of wood smoke. Scene opens on a family with several small children at a campground. One parent starts a campfire in a fire ring with the children gathered nearby. A voice over talks about the dangers of inhaling wood smoke, specifically noting how it is even more toxic than cigarette smoke. After the fire starts with its all too typical cloud of smoke, the rising smoke forms into a person smoking a cigarette. The smoke person takes a big inhale and then blows the smoke at the children. This continues as the voice over says, “You wouldn’t subject your children to secondhand cigarette smoke. Don’t subject them to toxic wood smoke. Wood smoke - harmful to breathe for everyone.” Then the words “Say no to campfires - for your health” come on the screen. Or something along those lines. I have a feeling that a lot of the parents who sit idly by and let their child inhale wood smoke would be appalled if someone came by and ...

We decided to hang out at the Coronado Campground in Bernalillo, New Mexico for a while to do basic housekeeping things, such as laundry. Bernalillo is just outside Albuquerque and would give us access to what we needed. We also ordered our solar panels and had them shipped here. The campsites are closer together than we prefer, but for a campground near a major metropolitan area, it still has its share of nature surrounding it. The Rio Grande flows alongside the campground - you can’t ask for much more than that. And the first night’s sunset was spectacular. The campground was relatively full when we pulled in. Fearing a night of campfires, we asked the host about their campfire policy after we registered. She hesitated, looked leery, and asked us what we wanted her to say. We told her we try to avoid them as much as possible. She said that if the wind was 10 mph or faster, fires were banned. Otherwise they had to be confined to the provided fire rings. Pat held up a finger ...

We were hooked on boondocking after Santa Fe. Our discussions now included solar panels. We saw one trailer in the forest campground set up with panels. Could that be for us? The day we left the Santa Fe Forest, we had planned to go to a campground with hookups closer to Albuquerque. But one road led to another, and in true rambling fashion we ended up by the Pecos River at the Villanueva State Park. They had electric/water hookups at this campground. But once we saw the more spacious and, in some cases, private sites without hookups at the top of a mesa area, we were ready to boondock again. It was nearly dark when we arrived. We chose an open site at the very top of the mesa and set up for the night. We noticed when we chose the site that it consisted of two sites very close together. We had placed our trailer in a way that appeared to occupy both sites, but with the campground likely to fill up for the weekend, we knew we might have to move over and allow another camper in...

We planned to stay at the Hyde Memorial State Park during our visit to Santa Fe. We hoped to snag one of the seven electric campsites in the park. But by the time we arrived on a Friday afternoon they were all taken. The sites were pretty tight. That can spell disaster for campfires, so even if one had been available, we probably would have moved on. That left us with a choice to make for our evening accommodations. We had been toying with the idea of boondocking (camping without most or all hookups) for a while, but we were both a bit afraid to take the leap and cut the cord. We weren’t fully set up to do it, but from what I had been reading, we could get by for a few days. We were both tired and ready to stop for the day. Our options nearby were to take a nonelectric site in the state park or move next door to the Santa Fe National Forest with the same setup. We made the leap and chose the forest. We pulled into the Black Canyon campground in the Santa Fe Forest and were im...

In early September, we camped at the Palo Duro Canyon State Park near Amarillo, TX. Neither of us had ever heard of it even though we both lived in Texas years ago. Seems like a well kept Texas secret since no one we have mentioned it to since our stay has heard of it either. Promoted as the second largest canyon in the United States, it offers a surprIsing vista of rugged moutains and valleys after driving through the flat land leading up to it. If you get a chance to visit, do. It is well worth the trip - just make sure you have enough gas to get down into the canyon and back out. When we arrive at a new campground, we usually like to choose our own campsite to do some campfire strategizing (which often doesn’t work out like we expected anyway, but we always hope for the best). In the case of the canyon, we had to leave the selection up to the park staff. I was told the Mesquite campground near the end of the eight-mile road down into the canyon would offer us the best night s...

The latest research notes that 84% of wildfires are started by humans ( http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/27/517100594/whats-the-leading-cause-of-wildfires-in-the-u-s-humans ). The National Park Service notes as many as 90% ( https://www.nps.gov/fire/wildland-fire/learning-center/fire-in-depth/wildfire-causes.cfm ). We had our own example last night of how humans cause wildfires. Just when we thought our evening’s campfire experience couldn't get more bizarre, it did. Shortly before the whole smoke invading the trailer incident began, we noticed someone pull up to an open campsite not far from us. They arrived in a truck towing a boat. There appeared to be several people in the truck. The campsite was downwind from us and located in a nearly deserted part of the campground. There was only one other trailer in the vicinity between us and the new arrival. They didn’t have an RV, just the boat. I didn’t see them haul out a tent. What I did see was a man get out of th...

At 9:30 p.m. last night, Pat walked out of the trailer and a big gust of wood smoke odor came in. He came back a few minutes later and said that nearly every campsite upwind of us had a fire going. It was still in the high 80s, and the air in our trailer was filling with wood smoke fast. I hopped in our truck and drove a distance away up a hill I thought would be a safe place to wait it out. Pat said he would stay behind and try to clear the trailer air. After being parked on the hill for a while, I looked back toward our campground and saw a big orangy, smoky cloud rising into the sky, siloueting the tall trees. It looked like what you might see if a house was on fire, the kind of sight that would prompt a call to the local fire department. I feared a trailer was on fire (hopefully not ours) and headed back to the campground to find Pat.  When I arrived I found not a trailer on fire, thankfully, but raging inferno part 2. The same campers who had started the inferno the ni...

Yesterday, a little after noon, as the temperature hit its high of 92 degrees, a man at a nearby campsite started a campfire, then five minutes later took off from his campsite with his friends in their truck towing a boat. He was riding in the boat at the helm. The fire smoked on. Just more campfire hijinks at the El Dorado State Park. And this wasn't the worst of it. Stay tuned.

It is 12 noon, already 87 degrees, and sunny here in El Dorado, Kansas. But I am not outside enjoying it as I would like to be. I am inside my trailer with all the windows closed because someone somewhere in the vicinity has started a fire already. I can’t see where the smoke is coming from but I can smell it. So let me take this time to write a little about the effects of wood smoke versus cigarette smoke. Here are a few facts gleaned from an article on the Families for Clean Air website. You can read the full page here. http://www.familiesforcleanair.org/health/health4/ The lifetime cancer risk of wood smoke is twelve times greater than the risk from a similar amount of cigarette smoke. The hazardous free radicals inhaled from wood smoke are chemically active 40 times longer in your body than inhaled cigarette smoke. It took a long time for the dangers of secondhand smoke from cigarettes to be fully acknowledged and acted on. But now those of us who want to avoid i...

Around 11 p.m. last night, Pat stepped outside to see if the wood smoke had cleared enough to open the windows. I could tell as soon as he opened the door that it hadn’t as the smell of wood smoke drifted in. Soon he stuck his head back in the door. “You have got to come out here and see this,” he said. “Can I even breathe?” I said. “Just get out here.” With hand over mouth, I stepped out and looked in the direction Pat was pointing. A raging inferno of a campfire was blazing about an eighth of a mile away. Mostly smoke with the orange of unseen flames at the bottom leaped up and around a large trailer. It soared at least 30 feet into the air. I couldn’t believe it and quickly ran back inside to breathe freely again. Pat came inside and said he could hear people laughing and talking loudly in that direction. The trailer where the fire was raging was right across from the campground host. Would he do anything about this crazy blaze? The “fire” quickly became a big ball o...

Is there any reason to start a campfire when it is 87 degrees outside with high humidity? A month ago I would have answered no. But we have witnessed this twice now on our adventure - during the week before the eclipse in Carbondale, Illinois where the temperatures were in the high 80s and 90s with high humidity - and again today in El Dorado State Park in Kansas. Two of our camping neighbors have started fires so far - the type we have come to expect - more smoke than flame. And I am not talking about starting them after the sun sets and maybe the heat breaks a bit. No, these fires have been started in the last few hours and it is only 7 p.m. now and still very warm. No one appears to be cooking at either fire. No campers are even around them. What the fires are doing is polluting the already thick air with their smoke. Why did these campers feel the need to start fires under these conditions? Is it some primitive need? Did they somewhere get the idea it isn't camping if the...

Fresh air. Who doesn’t want that? When my husband, Pat, and I took off on our full-time RV adventure we just assumed fresh air would be part of the package. We found out quickly we were wrong. All of the campgrounds we have visited so far have provided a fire ring per campsite. In many places campsites have been so close together as to be considered urban areas. This has even been true in some of the state parks we have visited. If everyone in a full campground started a fire in their fire ring, the air quality would be atrocious. While this has never been the case in the campgrounds we have visited (thank goodness!), even a few fires in a campground can make it challenging to find a fresh breath of air. Before I go any further let me establish that wood smoke from campfires is not just a benign smell that we are overreacting to. Yes, I am sensitive and allergic to a lot of things, and my sense of smell seems to have grown more sensitive over the years. According to the EPA, woo...