Open Letter to Ontario Parks – Why is your firewood always so shitty?

Ontario Parks,

You are the largest car camping provider in Ontario by default.  5 million camper nights visit your parks every year and you have been operating parks for over 100 years. I would think that by now you would have people with the knowledge, skillsets and ability to procure dry, properly seasoned firewood to sell at the parks by now.  Yet year after year, the firewood you sell at the parks is poor quality and continues to disappoint myself and hundreds of thousands of other park visitors per year.  In your 2012 car camping survey, a whopping 43% of the survey respondents indicated that the quality of the firewood Ontario Parks sells is unacceptable:

Unfortunately it is clear that no action has been taken by Ontario Parks to remedy this situation.

On a recent trip to Algonquin Park we bought several bags of extremely wet wood out of a trailer from Ontario Parks.  It was close to being the worst firewood I have ever purchased.  The wood was extremely wet.  I am not a novice fire starter by any means, but it took about 8 tries to get the fire started.  Newspaper would not start it even with the wood chopped down to matchstick and chip sizes.  We needed to use cottonballs soaked in Vaseline I usually use for backcountry fire lighting.  In fact it was so wet, we had to chop the majority up into pieces of kindling to get it to burn and sustain burning, even with the fire established.  We had to grill/dry the yet to be burned pieces on the campfire grill just to get some moisture out for it to burn. 

Luckily our camp neighbor came by our site and lent us his splitting axe for this task.  I would say that with the (lack of) quality wood I used at that park on that day, over 90% of the people who would try to use this would either not have had the skills or equipment to get a fire started using it.

There’s no excuse for this, especially in Algonquin Park.  There’s… um… 7,630 square kilometers of park that forestry companies log the crap out of.  Surely a miniscule portion of the hardwood that is harvested from this area could be properly seasoned and sold as firewood within the park.

Really, it’s not rocket science to properly season wood.  In case you don’t know how to do it, someone just has to split the wood and keep the wood under a covered, dry location for a year or two for it to dry out and season properly before selling it.  The key is it has to be stored in a dry location, which apparently not many of the firewood contractors you get wood from know how to do.  Why can’t you hold the contractors accountable for this… are you going for the lowest bid contractor to maximize margins on the rather expensive wood you sell?  The park employee at the campground gate was blaming the horrible wood condition on the wood being green wood, saying that the firewood contractor is changed every year so it is always green wood, but that wasn’t the case. I know green wood when I see it-this was just wet, improperly stored wood.  The park employee also said that it has been the same way year after year as well.  And it seems like this is the case in many other parks I have visited in the past. To be fair, some of the wood I have purchased in some Ontario Park locations is dry and good burning wood, but I would have to say the majority of the cases it is not.

Providing horrible quality firewood at expensive prices at your parks not only takes away from visitors’ camping experience enjoyment, but also encourages them to bring their own dry firewood from home or other locations which I’m sure you would not want in some locations due to the ash borer as well.

Please sort this out and get a plan to provide proper quality firewood to all your park locations.

Regards,

Outdoorjay

Someone else’s link: Bad Firewood from Ontario Parks
More complaints
 

Lion's Head Backpacking

 On the August Civil Holiday long weekend, some good friends of mine Pete and Natalie wanted to go on a spur of the moment backpacking trip.  We ended up going to Lion's Head part way up the Bruce Peninsula on the eastern side. It's a fantastic quick trip to do at the last moment, primarily because there is a nonreservable camping spot at the tip of Lion's Head called McKay's Harbour on the Bruce Trail which is maintained y the Bruce Conservancy.
Lion's Head affords awesome views of the Niagra Escarpment overlooking Georgian Bay.  I went to Adventure Guide looking fora new backpack beforehand.  I was wanting to get an Osprey Exos 48 backpack, since my oldschool Lowe Alpine 75+10 just doesn't cut it for quick backpacking trips, it also is heavy,  and overpadded unlike the modern packs.  Instead, i ended up getting an Osprey Talon 33 pack, good for day hikes and weekend ultralight backpacking, since they didn't have any Exos packs in stock.  the Talon 33 is a brilliant pack; I may do a review later, but t is just large enough to pack my Hennessey hammock, Jetboil and a few items of clothes, provisions for a weekend and my hydration pack.  We made a bit of a mistake of parking on the Scenic Caves Road.  The problem with that is we ended up hiking a fair bit on plain dirt roads and the highway to get to Lion's Head itself.  It would have been better off to just park at Barrow's Bay at the root of Lion's Head.  In any case, it was a nice walk in the countryside despite the traffic.
Lion's Head is a little bit of a hidden secret in that most people go straight to Tobermory and it isn't very crowded. The hike around Lion's Head is fantastic with many and we had great weather.We got into the campsite around 5 o'clock and set up two Henessey Hammocks and a Bivy sack, ate dinner and went for a swim.  It was the first time using my Jetboil stove and I was very impressed by the efficiency of the thing - it boils a liter of water in a minute or so!  Brilliant. 

The campsite was already populated by a large group of some kind of semi-organized group as well as a few randoms.  Despite that, there was still quite a bit of room to set up camp in the wooded area, and there is a thunderbox up a bit on a ridge.  We went for a swim and the water was a lot warmer than I thought it would be, which was a good surprise.  The beach is really just a bunch of rounded rocks but good enough to wade into the water for a swim.
The weather forecast looked good when we left, but the wind started picking up and lightning started rolling in at around midnight as I was finishing the last of my backcountry rye and coke - Fourty Creek rye with some Nuun Kona Cola electrolyte drink tablets and filtered water; highly recommended lightweight cocktail I might add.
So I retreated to my hammock, gathering all my gear and putting it directly under my hammock.  It was quite windy and rainy for a bit, and a second wave of rain and close lightning hit early morning around 6.  Luckily it cleared up before I crawled (or fell, really) out of bed.  I hadn't used my hammock before in really rainy conditions but I was impressed with the lack of wetness both on my gear and in my hammock...  pretty awesome.
I had some Starbucks Via coffee and a Mountain House dehydrated meal in the morning, we leisurely packed up, checking out a juicy Monarch caterpillar on a lone milkweed plant by the beach.  Interesting fact - Monarch caterpillars only eat milkweed leaves.  Starting out around the rest of Loin's Head along the Bruce Trail, we made our way along the beach for a short stretch then started ascending the escarpment among interesting rock formations.  Back on top there's more than plenty amazing views again, and we were lucky the sun had burnt off much of the moisture, the sky clear again.  We could make out kayakers and paddleboarders way down on the brilliant aqua blue and ghostly white limestone coastline.

We came up to the Lion's Head Lookout, undoubtedly the most amazing vantage point for stunning views.  It's an exposed outcrop jutting out of the escarpment and affords amazing views in both directions of the escarpment as well as the coastline across the bay and Lion's Head village down the coast. It's not much of a place for those with fear of heights.  Lion's head is also a prime rock climbing mecca, so we could see groups of climbers hanging from the cliffs in some areas.  This place is getting somewhat close to a parking area near Lion's Head village, so the trail traffic was picking up with mainly day hikers.
Continuing along there's some pothole formations to check out, including the massive Lion's Head pothole and another feature called Giant's Cauldron which isn't quite as impressive, but a cool geologic feature nonetheless.  Now we started a trudge through the woods along some old roads/cart paths and it branches off to the left to get back towards the direction our car was in, past Barrow's Bay.  After a while we got to a place called Finnegan's Forest (or so the signs said), a large canopy topped open woodland which was pleasant with the breeze and shade, but the mosquitoes were a bit out of control so we quickmarched that section till we hit a parking lot, walked along a road and ate lunch since we were real hungry by that point.  Making our way onto the main highway 9.  We decided to attempt to hitchhike instead of deathmarching along the highway with our sore feet with not much luck until we talked a local resident in Barrow's Bay to give me a lift to my car so I could go back and pick up Pete and Nat, where we then made our way back to Guelph with delightfully and surprisingly light traffic.  Great quick trip, amazing scenery and good camping with little planning!

Big Agnes Tensleep Station 4 Tent

I wanted a new car camping tent, so I picked this tent up for $425 at MEC.

I recently bought this tent because it has some unique features, and most of all it has more height for the size footprint it has compared to other tents with the same square footage.  I was looking for a roomy feeling yet compact footprint tent that is easy to set up and has nice features for car camping to very comfortably sleep two people, and I got that with this tent.  The front and rear vestibules adds some good features that other similar tents don’t have too.  This design has many elements that I do like, but unfortunately it does have what I consider some design flaws that I am surprised the manufacturer did not pick up on before going to production.
To make this short and sweet, here's a list of Pros and Cons I found about the tent.

Pros:
1)    Intuitive, easy set up with four poles. I only needed instructions the first time.
2)    High tent height and near vertical walls give it a very roomy feeling for its footprint.  It fits a queen size inflatable mattress easily.
3)    Front and rear large entrances for flexibility
4)    Many gear pockets to stash stuff in
5)    Vestibules give ample room to keep gear dry
6)    I really like the organized and easy to use folder/stuffsack/backpack/carry bag the tent stores in.  It’s very easy to pack up and gives options for carrying different ways.
 
Cons:
1)    Front door of the tent is mesh only – should be double door nylon and mesh to give the option for ventilation or privacy/rain protection.  With the way it is, if you want privacy and to protect from splashes when raining, the vestibule door has to be closed, and there’s not much ventilation when it’s like that.
2)    Rear door has a similar issue, it’s nylon only no mesh – it should at least have a portion that could unzip for a meshed window for improved ventilation.
3)    Way, way too many guy lines for the fly…   really, is it necessary to have 10 of them?  Even though they are nicely reflective, anyone walking near the vicinity of your tent other than the entrances at night is going to trip.  Trust me.
4)    All three main tent poles bent permanently in middle with the first use.  I didn’t abuse/force anything, excessively tie anything down and it wasn’t in high winds at all.  The material the poles are made of simply is not suitable for this design and should be made from a higher strength aluminum or fiberglass - period.  I have not used this tent in anything more than light-medium winds, but I would suspect there would be much more bending going on if there was more wind, especially due to the high tent profile.
5)    It’s a little heavy for anything other than car camping.  Possibly can be used for canoe camping without many portages.
Despite these shortcomings, some of which I think should have been obvious and addressed by the manufacturer, I still would recommend this tent.  It would be an awesome tent if Big Agnes fixed these problems.

Cold Weather Gear for Winter Camping

   It's a frosty -22 celsius outside so I have my mind on cold weather gear.  I would like to do a winter camping weekend somewhere this season.  Frontenac Park, Alggonquin, Killarney, Tobermory maybe?  But this year in particular has had it's share of wwell below zero days and nights.  Got to have some good gear to be prepared, so i ordered some recently.
     I just ordered a Hadron S down filled hat from Black Rock Gear. It's ultra light, warm and protective with the siliconized coating.  They just had some come back in stock.  Most of the gear they sell has been sold out, likely due to the frigid climate this season.  This one I should be getting in a week or so.
     I also ordered a pair of custom down pants from Goose Feet Gear.  Again, this is a favorite of the ultralighters, there's no zippers or pockets to add unneccessary weight, and is ultra customizeable.  I chose to get mine with proper baffles instead of sewn through construction, filled with 4.5 oz. of down, and with ultralight fabric.  Should be nice and toasty.  I can layer it with fleece or capilene base layers and over top it with some snowboard pants or a lightweight shell to up the warmth when the mercury drops.  I hope I get this soon in time for a winter camping expedition, although they say it can take up to 10 weeks for custom gear.  If not, i will have them on hand for next year.  It took me a while to find these guys, i originally was going to get some Montbell or Western Mountaineering pants.  I actually ordered some WM flash pants from an outdoor company in Texas but was told they couldn't ship to me due to some BS> about tarrifs, or so someone from WM told me when I emailed them about it.  In any case I am glad that didn't work out, since the flash pants I ordered only has about 2 oz of down fill and would have been much colder than the Goose Feet Gear pants I ordered.. not to mention the GFG pants are almost the same cost!  Long live grassroots small gear manufacturers of quality products.
     Down apparel isn't all that cheap, especially when enveloped in lightweight fabrics, but it sure does keep you warm.  I'll do a first impressions review of these good looking pieces of gear, and hopefully get to test them out with a nice backcountry weekend somewhere in the near future.
       In the meantime, here's an entertaining video with some crazy dude named Shugemery I stumbled upon while surfing Youtube who's hammock camping in Minnesota in -40.  Yes -40.  At that tempterature celsius and fahrenheit are the same.  That's hardcore.