Everyone Loves A Campfire
When you’re on a camping trip you’ve got to have a campfire. It’s an essential part of the outdoor experience. Roasting marshmallows over the flames, cooking a hotdog on a stick, sitting in the flickering golden light and feeling the comforting heat, these are everyone’s fond memories of camping.
Often, these days, when you’re planning your awesome outdoor weekend/holiday you find with dismay that campfires are banned.
Extreme fire seasons have led to a hypersensitivity to campfires. Even though campfires are not the cause of most wildfires, (lightening is nature’s fire starter) a few negligent campers have allowed their campfires to get out of control and cause major wildfires. This has led to a ban on campfires during the dry, hot summer months, which just happens to be the same time of year millions of people head to the outdoors with their friends and family.
Firewood
Another obstacle to the wonderful nostalgic experience of a camping trip with evenings around the campfire is the cost and availability of firewood.
When we hit the road, heading south for the winter in 2017, our destination was the Arizona desert. There’s lots of rocks and big beautiful sunsets, but one thing in short supply is trees.
Firewood is hard to come by in the desert and you’re definitely not going to be gathering your own from around your campsite. Expensive bundles can be purchased at most stores and gas stations but a $5-7 dollar bundle will only get you an hour or so of fire. If you want to sit in the golden light and drink beer for hours it’s really going to cost you.
We decided, since Oregon is full of firewood, we would load up a bunch and bring it with us. Unfortunately there are fairly strict rules about transporting firewood (especially through California with their fruit nazi border checkpoints) due to invasive species concerns. For this reason we had to go around Cali and this meant going through extreme southeastern Oregon and through northern Nevada. Talk about desolate. At one point the gas station we had planned to use (they are VERY few and far between) was closed down. We had come very far since the last available station and were extremely low on gas. We didn’t have enough to make it to the next bigger town. We had to go out of our way, 50 miles each direction, to a little ranch store and pay almost $5 a gallon.
Trying Something New
For the following winter in the Arizona desert we decided to try something different. We had seen some RVers on YouTube using this Little Red Campfire. It was the solution to all of the problems mentioned above.
The 15 pound, small, completely contained little campfire was a great purchase. Since we already traveled with a 5 gallon propane tank for our bbq, it was a very small addition to our gear.
In places where wood fires are banned or firewood is a scarce, pricey commodity this can give you the campfire experience. You get the marshmallow roasting, and campfire stories with a good cold beer that you’re looking for in a camping trip.
We bought our Little Red Campfire (big version) from Amazon 2 years ago for a little over $140 (I notice the price has gone up) and have been very happy with the solution it provides. My link below will take you to Amazon where you can read more reviews, see more specs, and maybe get one for yourself.
~ all photos taken with my iPhone 6s
