Fire or no fire?

I haven't had a fire while backpacking in many years. Haven't been able to have one legally for nearly that long. Most areas that I backpack in California have either permanent fire bans or seasonally imposed fire restrictions, neither of which seems to stop people from having fires, though. I always dismantle and scatter illegal fire rings when I find them.

So, are you for or against campfires? 

Also, are you for or against pooping in the woods?  Or toilet paper for that matter? Are you saying that people shouldn't use toilet paper while camping, because they don't know how to properly cleanup after themselves, just like they don't properly put out a campfire?

Relax.

Take a deep breath.

Calm.

Down....... Zen-smiley

You are TOTALLY "against pooping". I can tell. 

Haha, I'm just kidding.

I agree with pretty much all of what you said.  I just don't see the harm in having a fire, if it all the conditions are favorable.  People will bitch about the "environment" but they still drive a car, buy bottled water and coffee in styrofoam containers. Until that goes away, I don't even wanna hear any bullshit from some shlub about my campfire, if I wanna have one. 

I think that the OP meant do you like a campfire "under the right conditions" and assuming we all clean up after ourselves.

Yeah I agree. 5 minutes of use for something that took 1000 years to make. Plastic in general. Its ridiculous how much over packaging there is. Those damn plastic grocery bags,  I hate those things. 

Until you have actually completely dismantled a fire ring you haven't done diddly to clean up after yourself. People don't do that. I'm trail crew -- we tear down illegal fire rings and decimate illegal campsites, and they come back the next year.

Here is what cleaning up after yourself entails. Scoop up all the ashes and widely disperse them through the forest, after hauling them far from water sources. Disperse all rocks far and wide. Re-naturalize the area -- erase any fire scarring from granite and get duff to cover over the dirt areas. If the fire ring was well established you should have some heavy gloves to sift through the foot deep ashes to remove all broken glass and sharp burnt up cans, and blobs of plastic, and anything else that people have tossed in there because they are too lazy to carry it out.

Comparisons to people driving cars are silly. You're not driving your car in the wilderness. The wilderness is there to preserve the area from the modern world, as much as possible, and while we could argue endlessly and get nowhere about ozone layers and air pollution, the car doesn't go back there, the trash shouldn't stay there, the rest of the modern junk we perpetuate doesn't belong there -- and yet I find NEW fire rings full of trash every single time we revisit our local wilderness areas, and every hint of a fire however properly done encourages some idiot to build a massive fire ring where the first one was, and then there is a towering ring of rocks full of ash littered with blobs of things that were formerly diapers, plastic bottles, bits of whatever someone didn't want to carry out again, shards of glass (some of these look like they came from windows or mason jars or from something huge and heavy that required quarter-inch-thick glass -- what are people doing???).

Clueless people are sheep. "Well, someone else did it and didn't get caught. It must be okay." I went on a week long trip earlier this year. Five minutes from the trailhead (where it is illegal to camp, let alone build a fire) I saw smoke. We found a small ring covered with smaller rocks. People had camped there, built a fire, threw all their trash in, threw in rocks, and left it smoldering. The fire burned underground and there was a burnt area app. 15 feet in diameter around the ring. We took off the packs, took pictures, got out our foldup buckets and potty trowels, and put that sucker out before it traveled any farther -- hauled gallons of water up from the stream fifty feet down the hill, dug and dug and kept finding hot spots in roots, and got it all put out. Took us two hours. It would have taken one bucket of water to put out the original fire, no doubt, and there you go -- there is no doubt in my mind those fools thought "I know how to do this" and just did it. That could have been a waste of millions of dollars fighting a fire that was completely preventable.

EVERYONE THINKS THEY KNOW HOW TO DO FIRES. Absolutely everyone. And yet, forest fires keep happening. Google up the Soberanes fire, and how massive and devastating it was. That was started by a fire in a state park where camping and fires were banned. You may be a wonderful exceptionally responsible person, but really, can anyone who's watched the thousands of fires going in California this year blame me for thinking that people who pretend a fire in this drought-ridden tinder box of a state is an okay thing, in any wilderness? I don't pretend anymore that I know how to have a safe fire, even though I do, because sometimes there is no such thing. I stopped having them outside the big metal fire rings in car campgrounds. Arrogant posturing has no place here anymore.

Am I against campfires? No. Am I against campfires when good sense says it's incredibly likely to turn into something else? YES. I like hiking. If it's all burnt up there's nowhere to hike....

Me too!

Here in Utah and especially the High Uinta's, you will find abundant campfire rings back-to-back-to back. There is actually a summer ranger that patrols with three horses. One he rides, the other two for hauling other peoples trash.