[tom roy]

The only wood. that causes smoke is a bundle of that green wood they sell for six bucks at campcrounds. I get more solitude at the nehalem bay state park at night than places like jeff park.enchantments. Or the goat rocks. Most campmer at nehalam have rvs and trailers.They dissapear inside their rigs at sunset We sit out alone with a nice fire. Sometmes watching tent camp campers. Fight that wet six dollar wood with smoke belowing out of the fire ring.

[wheatie]

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[Ski]

I'm thinking threads about cairns and flag tape are much better for bringing out the real hidden idiot in people than fires. Some people have a propensity for leaning toward the philosophical or sentimental about fires and you just don't see the same level of moronic behavior. I am glad this conversation came up, though, because it really got me to wondering if that fire I built one night up on the Nisqually would have been visible from the Space Shuttle. I managed to get a good part of the log jam alight, so we're probably talking about a surface area on the gravel bar maybe 20 x 40 feet. Flames were high enough to scorch the alders on the opposite bank (this was along a side channel, so we're only talking maybe 40 or 50 feet or so there) and the rocks were still hot as hell the next afternoon. So.... the Space Shuttle is about the size of a football field, from what I understand, but it's got a reflective surface which probably heightens its visibility. Anybody crunched the numbers and ever tried to figure out just how big a fire you'd have to have for it to be visible from Outer Space? I mean... could you do it on your own, or are we talking along the scale of maybe Dresden when the allied forces bombed it in February 1945?

[tom roy]

We went back there for a few days and it seems the concern is about radiation from the Japan disaster. One of the rangers told me they get a lot of complaints now mostly from people with small children. Had some person not dumped five gallons of water on our fire while we were gone for a moment. And just expressed their concern we would have understood, problem solved. I hope I did not harm any children on this trip as I handed out over sixty sand dollars we found. Please tell me I did nothing wrong. And we did not burn drift wood on this trip.