Leave No Trace

[Non-Typical Solutions]

There is no excuse for disrespecting our forest in this manner! You can’t fix stupid!

[elkaholic]

Trash is a very sad thing to see left behind. 

Another issue we will start seeing again is campfires. not only illegal but left burning/ smoldering.

This the season!

No way they can go camping without a campfire. 

 

[AZAV8ER]

When we leave a camp you would be hard pressed to find any trash, its just the ethos I was raised with. On the flip side I always leave my fire pit intact, run an efficient fire so in the AM when we drown out the embers and coals its mostly just ash. Never could figure why scatter nice wood you worked hard to collect. But heck where we go when we come back a year latter nothing has been used or disturbed, nice not to have to rebuild fire pit every year.

[452b264]

Right there is one reason why I dont camp in developed camp sites. I like to carry the contractors garbage bags from home depot for our trash since they dont blow out, and we also burn any cans in the fire pit when its legal to have a fire so the remnants dont attract insects, before we start another fire we pick up all the cans a put them in the trash bag.

[AZDirtyTaco]

37 minutes ago, AZAV8ER said:

When we leave a camp you would be hard pressed to find any trash, its just the ethos I was raised with. On the flip side I always leave my fire pit intact, run an efficient fire so in the AM when we drown out the embers and coals its mostly just ash. Never could figure why scatter nice wood you worked hard to collect. But heck where we go when we come back a year latter nothing has been used or disturbed, nice not to have to rebuild fire pit every year.

I get it, and it just kinda depends on how you look at it. Leaving the ring is a bit nuanced for sure and doing your part to leave that place in a way you would hope to see someone else leave it is the important part I think. It shows care, and too many people flat don't.

My philosophy is to always do my best to leave our spot better than we found it and as close to its original state as possible. We spend most of our time in the wilderness areas and are always trying to minimize our footprint. The little twigs and debris adds up quickly after a just a night or two and before you know it, there's a decent-sized area that is a mess of a pile that suffocates the ground cover. It can even be a bit of an eyesore in some places. The primary goal being to help the ground recover faster and leave no trace of our stay.  If there is a stack worth keeping for a return trip, we'll tuck it into a spot close by that is out of casual sight if we're camped along a trail.  We'll often times even hook up the next weary traveler with a ready-made supply of good tinder and wood to get a decent fire going quickly.

The repeated use of the same pits in popular areas starts to get outa control when one group after the next piles on. It doesn't take long before you have this disgusting 2' mound of soot and whatever each group of knuckleheads added to the mix. We'll knock them down, clean out the trash (glass, Copenhagen tins, plastic, cans, endless bottle caps, etc.) and freshen the joint up. I'll use Reavis Ranch as an easy example of a popular spot here - outa control!

Some of this is relative to the location and general access for the masses. But I still do my best to apply all of the above to any place we stay, even when it's already badly beaten down. Wild places in AZ are smaller and fewer by the day. Time to start really doing more to preserve what little we have. Our kids need to have as much 'wild' left intact as possible to help feel some semblance of exploration and discovery.

[photofool]

On 5/8/2020 at 8:48 AM, elkaholic said:

Trash is a very sad thing to see left behind. 

Another issue we will start seeing again is campfires. not only illegal but left burning/ smoldering.

This the season!

No way they can go camping without a campfire. 

 

The FS fire crew found 18 illegal campfires and 8 abandon campfires this weekend.

[maximus]

i was elk hunting up in the san francisco peaks off trail at about 10500 feet and found 2 empty coors lite cans, i will guess it was hunters off trail.

gives everybody a bad name, we don't need that.

[AZDirtyTaco]

On 5/10/2020 at 10:21 AM, maximus said:

i was elk hunting up in the san francisco peaks off trail at about 10500 feet and found 2 empty coors lite cans, i will guess it was hunters off trail.

gives everybody a bad name, we don't need that.

Always hard to see how someone would appreciate an area enough to work so hard to get there and then treat it like a dump.  So sad.

I am heading up to the peaks once the snow thaws out and will up there a bunch this summer. I am planning to backpack hunt it this Sept. Would you be comfortable sharing anything you've learned about reliable water sources up there? PM me if you don't mind, please.

[bigbuckfever]

Jerks have been leaving their crap in the forests forever.  I always have extra cans and mylar balloons to unload from my pack when I get back to camp.  Found these two that I didn't toss on my last two trips looking for antlers.  Coors and Bud from days of old.  If someone can explain how to turn these I would greatly appreciate it (for this and future posts)

[G_E_E]

On 5/11/2020 at 5:29 PM, bigbuckfever said:

Jerks have been leaving their crap in the forests forever.  I always have extra cans and mylar balloons to unload from my pack when I get back to camp.  Found these two that I didn't toss on my last two trips looking for antlers.  Coors and Bud from days of old.  If someone can explain how to turn these I would greatly appreciate it (for this and future posts)

So cool man, I'm always looking for cool relics from the past.  So far nothing but a few horse shoes