No Campfires Campaign

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...