Sunday, July 12, 2009

Fire

So I went on a campout with the Elder's quorum this last weekend. Had a few interesting experiences. The campfire was left completely unattended while people went to play games. When the games descended into pelting eachother with glowsticks I decided to bow out and tend the fire. Earlier that evening large logs were being put on even though it was getting close to the end of the night. Didn't make any sense to me, but when I asked if that was a little excessive (thinking that we'd want to let the fire burn down so it could go out) I was told "well what else are we going to do with it?" So before I went to bed I poured enough water on the fire to reduce it to a smoldering bed of coals. Didn't want to use up the rest of my water bottle on the fire and I figured the other guys could handle it the rest of the way with their water when they came to bed. Woke up the next morning before anyone else and found to my dismay the fire was still burning as a smoldering bed of coals, which between myself and the next person who woke up was built back up to a roaring fire by just dropping some wood on it. I told the second person who woke up that the fire hadn't gone out last night. The response was, "It normally doesn't".

So, I'm wondering if I went through the same boy scout program as these guys or something. Leaving fires unattended, building them so high they burn till the morning light, chopping wood repeatedly so close to other people that we were routinely being showered with wood chips, attempting to chop down trees for firewood without even bothering to check if they are alive or not and continuing to chop them even after its pointed out that they aren't dead. Don't even ask me if that was legal. Kind of freaky, but the general sense I got from the condition of the park we were in was that most people were fairly disrespectful of the forest. The trees along the road had relatively fresh names carved in them (people dated their carvings) a good 10-15 feet off the ground, indicating going to a significant trouble to vandalize the woods. I just hope the fire practices of my Elder's Quorum are not normal for Utahans. If they are they deserve all the fires they have to fight every year.

1 comment:

Sean said...

That is very irresponsible fire management. How is it people can be so dumb? I'm glad you made it out alive before they burnt the whole forest down.