MREs. PB&J. Granola bars. Cold beans.
My campfires aren’t for cooking.
I once had a group of intrepid paddlers convinced that every campsite along the Petawawa in the east end of Algonquin was equipped with a BBQ. As did pretty much every river tripper in the province, we had been paddling the Pet from Traverse to McManus each spring. One winter we learned that the park was establishing a few cabins in Algoinquin so that people could paddle from cabin to cabin rather than have to set up tents each night. When chatting about this, I told a whopper to my buddies, claiming that even the tent sites now came with BBQs.
I’m not much of one for portaging, so I would end up ahead of them quite often. The next spring, I made sure to get to the tent sites each afternoon well ahead of the rest of the crew, so that I had time to pull a portable BBQ out of my canoe pack and set it up before they arrived. It never occurred to them that I was packing along a BBQ, so following the trip, they started innocently and mistakenly telling other paddlers that the Pet now had BBQs at each site.
Presently, the south-east end of the park is closed, and open fires are restricted throughout the park. You can still use gas stoves (naptha/white gas, kerosene, etc., but not twig and battery stoves). The size and weight of a hiking stove and fuel is trivial on canoe trips.
I don’t build campfires. I like to spend the daylight hours paddling, so after a good dinner, I’ll hit the sack when the sun goes down and the bugs come out, rather than sit about in smoke and 'skeeters, and I’ll greet the sunrise rather than sleep in. My tents has a bug netting roof, so I can lie in bed and look up at the stars! (Besides which, I don’t like stinking of smoke, and I get headaches from stuffed up sinuses.)
Down where you will be paddling, sunset these days is about a quarter to nine (with it not getting dark until about nine-thirty), and sunrise is about a quarter to six. If you want to see the sunset and see the sunrise, but still have a good night’s sleep, you’ll not have time for a fire.
As far as cooking goes, campfires are a bit messy when compared to stoves. Soot will get on your pots and pans, unless you thoroughly soap their exteriors prior to each use. Campfires are also time consuming, for you have to collect wood. If you decide to have campfires on other trips when there is no open fire restriction, pick up your firewood along the way throughout the day, rather than collecting it at the camp site, for the vegetation around most campsites in Algonquin is stripped and trampled by paddlers who like campfires.
Most of the sites in the south east end of Algonquin have established fire rings or fireplaces. Do not burn on a spot where there is not already an established fire pit or fireplace, for you will be leaving a permanent scar that will take many years to be covered over, and you may start a root fire (a very common cause of forest fires). If someday you end up paddling in wilderness where there are not established fire rings or fireplaces, but you still want a fire, use a fire pan. If you have a fire, pack the ashes out and spread them throughout the day. Algonquin is a managed near-wilderness. It is close to major urban areas, is heavily used, and has volunteers and staff who maintain the campsites as best they can. Ongoing use not only denudes campsite deadfall but also results in an accumulation of ashes that get tracked about and get washed about by rain.
Over the years, there has been a shift in how people conduct themselves in the bush in Algonquin (and elsewhere, of course). Algonquin was (and still is) a timber reserve. Conservation initially only referred to the conservation of the economic resource of timber (read up on the history of the logging of white pine in Ontario to get a feel for this), including the need to deter individuals buying up the land and trying to farm it (not that the few farms in Algonquin ever did well – way too rocky). No thought was given to maintaining the land for wilderness values.
Over time, people started using Algonquin for fishing, but then again little thought was given to wilderness values. The type of canoeing that was popular in Algonquin was base camp oriented, in which people would set up a camp, and make excursions from it, bringing home their catch each evening. (Even today, most canoeists in Algonquin are weekend warriors who do not venture more than one overnight into the park.) In the first half of the last century, some folks paddled for days or even weeks at a time in Algonquin (e.g. Thomson), but they were the minority.
These base camps tried to re-create all the comforts of home, with the campers cutting down vegetation to build platforms, racks and shelters, and sawing logs for campfires, which in those days really were the only way of cooking food short of packing in cast iron camp stoves. Campsites looked like camp or cottage sites. This approach is still used by many hunters and fishermen. The good ones clean up their trash, and the bad ones don’t, but either way, they leave large camp sites that are more summer camps rather than temporary waypoints.
In the early part of the last century, recreational canoeing (my canoe club in Sudbury is 110 years old), children’s camps and scouting grew in popularity, so “campcraft” skills, including cutting, sawing, building tables, racks and shelters, catching or snaring one’s meals, and making campfires, were taught to generations of recreational near-wilderness users. The approach was still very much base camp oriented, although there was a growth in short canoe trips (e.g. circle routes out of Opeongo and Temagami). Unfortunately, base camp oriented woodcraft was used indiscriminately in the back country, so most of the canoe routes in Algonquin ended up with happy camper campsites in which wilderness values were pretty much ignored, resulting in campsites having multiple fire scars, charcoal and ash littering the sites, and vegetation being trampled and denuded in the areas around campsites. The ethic was build something nice that the next party could use, to leave some firewood for them, and to try to live off the resources of the land, rather than rely on tents, stoves and packed-in food. Standard equipment for a canoe party included an axe, a saw, several large knives, and lots of twine. Many people still hold to this approach (for example, in the recreational canoeing realm, many paddlers who frequent the Superior National Forest and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area are into old-style camp craft).
In the ‘70s there was a huge growth in recreational paddling, being the result of the boomer generation combined with school teachers promoting canoeing (e.g. the Ontario Recreational Canoeing Association). The influx of paddlers in the near wilderness was more than the land could support. Popular camp sites were being loved to death, so a new ethic developed by which paddlers tried to avoid causing impacts on the land. “Leave no trace” became the goal. Set up a tent rather than build a lean-to; use a stove rather than a fire; pack-in your food rather than catch it; pack out your trash rather than leave it (in more fragile environments, this extends to packing out your poop and not peeing on the land); keep to one trail rather than trample vegetation . . . . In general, try to leave the land with as little impact as possible. Leave the axe and saw at home.
No-trace practices combined with campsite maintenance and rehabilitation by park staff and volunteers have been very successful at mitigating the problems caused by camp craft and over-use, so I strongly encourage you to try to leave no trace, and to consider whether or not a campfire fits with this ethic, given the particular constraints of whichever site you find yourself at on a given evening.
One of the problems with the de-emphasis of wood craft is that many recreational paddlers are heading out into the land with every modern gadget known to man, but sweet butkuss in wilderness skills. For example, Martathon’s Al Mitchell, who passed away a couple of winters back, spent many summers prospecting by canoe in the Torngats. His food supply for each season was a couple of sacks of flour and some salt. How many wilderness paddlers today have the skills to travel comfortably for extended periods across remote wilderness providing for themselves? Almost none. Very few people these days have the wilderness skill set that he and his generation of wilderness paddlers had.
I think that it is important to be able to comfortably live off the land if you want to get into remote wilderness canoeing, for you never know when you will lose your boat and gear, but I also think that it is important to learn and practice these skills in environments that will not leave an impact on popular camp sites. Find an area that is scheduled for harvesting in the next year or two, and practice your wood craft skills there, rather than at water’s edge (and when it comes to fires, practice finding your fuel in a limited area, but then pack it out and build your fire in a proper fire pit). Put in some time learning to fish and snare even if you intend to pack-in your food, and of course study and practice orienteering.
Part of the trend away from self-reliance has included ever increasing reliance on guidebooks. In the late 70s, Hap Wilson authored “Canoe Routes of Ontario”, which gave general descriptions of popular canoe routes. It became a bible for trippers in the province. Over the years, other authors came out with ever more detailed route descriptions. George Drought, a truly wonderful person who passed away this spring, wrote many excellent river guides for Ontario routes. The problem with guidebooks is that they have got to the point that they detail every step of the way, right down to the route to pick through wild water. You know how some folks will religiously follow a car’s GPS map even when it is wrong? Well the same thing happens with folks following detailed river guide books – they follow the book rather than assessing the rapids, not realizing that water levels make all the difference in the world, and that occasionally there are errors (read up on map problems regarding the Missinaibi’s Thunderhouse Falls for a taste of this).
To help get away from an over-reliance on topo maps and guidebooks, outdoor ed and adventure leadership programs are getting into mapless tripping, which takes the leave no trace ethic as a given, and puts a bit of the adventure of exploration back into the mix by not using maps, so as help paddlers develop skills at making their way across the land based on their own observations and wilderness skills – a wilderness craft, but not traditional camp craft. I think that this is a good thing, for instead of being on a guided tour, in which one is moving from pre-identified way-point to pre-identified way-point, the paddler explores continuously, observing everything along the way, and then uses these observations when making decisions that must be relied upon. I’ve paddled and hiked in places in Ontario that did not have topographic maps, or that had frequently erroneous provisional topographic maps, and in pre-internet days I was never one to wait for a mail-order map, so I’ve always preferred to think of a map as a nice thing to have along, but pretty low on the necessity list, and I strongly believe that relying on white water guides for anything other than general conditions and specific cautions is suicide, so I’m pleased that the current trend in tripping instruction is toward greater self-reliance and wilderness skills development, including mapless tripping, while at the same time rigorously insisting on no trace.
We’re getting to the point that we can have our cake and eat it too – pack along but do not use a map, GPS, epirb/spot etc. unless necessary. Of course there are ramifications from this approach too, such as risk homeostasis, for when an activity’s risks are mitigated, folks will often take more risks, leaving them at the same level of risk exposure as they were prior to the mitigation – thus paddlers hucking off waterfalls that used to be non-navigable. I recall writing about this sort of thing a couple of decades back, and John Winters trying to alert paddlers to the issue.
Bottom line? Know yourself, know your environment, and be respectful to the land and to others who pass through it.