Campfires are part of the mystique of wilderness camps and even summer picnics, but in many national parks and public lands those days are gone. Open fires are banned either seasonally because of fire danger or permanently because of overuse. Wildfires aren't the only thing the rangers are worried about. People tend to overdo the whole fire business. Instead of building enough fire to cook supper, they build enough fire to signal an airborne search and rescue mission. Big fires leave big scars, and the ash pit is only a part of it.

Think how much firewood it takes for a family of five to build a fire to roast marshmallows. It isn't about the heat, it's about the warmth and the light and the atmosphere. Most people build so much fire that they have to wait for it to burn down so they can get close enough to dangle those sugar blobs on the edge of the coals for a few painful seconds before retreating again. That's a bonfire, not a cooking fire. We don't cook with wood often enough to know how it should be done. If we all built bonfires in the park every weekend our parks would look like the six square miles around the average village in India, where people have to walk for hours to find anything better than cow dung to cook with. In nearly every camping spot in nearly every camp ground in this country, you'll find some sort of permanent fire ring or barbecue grill, and a long list of rules that tell you what you can burn in it. I wish the rules weren't necessary, because I don't go to the wilderness in pursuit of rules, but even in the back country I do try to follow most of them and I grudgingly agree with the reasoning behind all the structure.

Save our parklands and our wilderness. Get a camp stove.

If you're sold on the idea of flickering flames and the smell of wood smoke, there's still a backpacking or hiking stove that will do that. Actually there are several commercial models and a whole lot of functional home built designs if you want to make one yourself -- for the cost of a quart can of tomatoes. Check out the wood stove plans section at Zen Stoves if you'd like to make your own. Wood fired camp stoves small enough to fit in a backpack really do work well enough to make sense. You'll need enough fire building skill to start a fire with wet or dry materials in any weather, but some of us think we can do that and consider this part of the wilderness experience.

In real life you need a backup system, which may as well be a homemade ultralight alcohol stove (also from plans at Zen Stoves), but debris stoves do work well enough to depend on as your main cooking fire. Cheap, light and somewhat efficient, they still give a camp that authentic smell -- the good one, not the other one you get when you've been on the trail for too long. Debris stoves run on twigs and dry weed stems and pine cones, and the size of the fire you can fit in that can is actually the size of fire you should build if you want to cook a meal. It's a little more efficient than a small pit fire, and a little less destructive to the environment.

On the down side, you'll have soot and ashes to deal with, the smoke will get in your eyes, and on a bad day you'll have to settle for cold food. In some places you won't find fuel, and you'll need the foresight to bring your own. In alpine areas where vegetation is scarce and the air is thin, you'll need a better stove.

There are some good wood fuel stoves available ready made that will outlast any of the cheap models you can build. They weigh a little more, but they are more fuel efficient and also more stable. That's important if you are a little low on food and your supper is balanced on the top of one. Suddenly a dented tin can with holes in won't look like such a great foundation.

Bush Buddy, Uniflame, Littlebug and Trailstove all have slightly different ideas about the right thing to do. Bush Buddy -- very nice design but it takes up space because it won't fold. Uniflame -- folds flat, stability questionable, and good luck finding one in this country. Littlebug -- great idea and it doubles as a stand for a backup alcohol stove, but put it in your pack and don't try to use it as a sleeping mat cover. Trailstove -- rugged, efficient and too heavy. Don't invest a lot of money in a wood fired stove, because they'll probably soon go the way of open fires and be banned as too incendiary. You still have sparks and embers to control.

Though alcohol stoves aren't quite so fuel efficient as white gas stoves, taking about twice as much fuel and twice as much time to cook a meal, they are a lot more friendly. Alcohol fumes are not explosive, and if you want you can even pack a bottle of Everclear grain alcohol to burn in your stove or in your stomach. Other types of alcohol make good fuel for the stove, such as the alcohol you put in a gas tank to remove water, but are poisonous if consumed. Don't confuse the different types -- unless something is labeled for human consumption don't drink it. If you want good fuel, look at the alcohol percentage. Rubbing alcohol won't do -- there's far too much water in the mix.

An alcohol stove is very simple and very light and can be as minimal as an empty cat food tin with holes punched around the rim. Pour some alcohol in it, light it off, and set your cooking pot on top. If you prefer something more durable and more stable, the Trangia is a proven manufactured design and has several advantages the homemade types do not.

Homemade stoves usually waste fuel. Most don't seal, so any fuel you put in the stove is either burned or thrown away. The Trangia has a simmering cover which will also smother the flame when closed. A different lid seals the stove completely, saving whatever fuel is left over for the next fire. The Trangia isn't flimsy aluminum -- the brass construction makes it a little heavier than an empty can but it won't get crushed or dented in your pack. The Trangia also fits into the Littlebug debris stove, making a perfect secondary fire source in conditions that don't favor a wood chip blaze. Accessories include windscreens and pot rests in several efficient light weight designs.

Alcohol stoves are lighter and safer than gas stoves but in extremely cold temperatures or at high altitudes they can't compete with the higher BTU output of gas.

Yes, it's old, and it's a little heavy (the specs say it weighs a pound and a half but I don't believe it's true since the really good gear actually has negative weight). And I've put a few dents in it over the years, lost one of the pot rest irons in the mountains someplace and cobbled a new one out of a rusty piece of coat hangar I found in an old campsite, otherwise it's still running on the original parts it had in 1972. It's a little scary, and the directions that came with it are probably illegal to pass along considering how safety regulations have evolved over the years. But I like it, in spite of the small explosions involved in the lighting procedure and the jet engine roar it makes while you're cooking. It works. It cooks fast. You can get results in sub zero cold and high mountain air, so long as you know a few tricks.

I'm speaking of the Svea 123, now superseded by the self cleaning Svea 123R and marketed by both Katahdin and Optimus. You won't find many products of any kind which are followed up by glowing review after glowing review. Nearly everyone who uses a Svea loves it. Those who are afraid of fire, well, they may not buy one in the first place. It's a camp stove for those who love the smell of naptha in the morning.

I've heard, although I haven't done so myself, that a Svea will run on just about anything, from naptha (white gas or Coleman fuel) to unleaded gasoline to kerosene and even diesel. I don't see the point of trying it with anything but white gas, because white gas is economical and easy to find. But if you're trekking through the Sahara and can't find naptha, it might be good to know that other things work in a pinch. Or, you could build a fire of camel dung.

The only thing guaranteed to work well in a Svea is white gas and there are lots of good reasons to stick with that fuel. First, you won't run any risk of messing up your stove. White gas burns nearly without fumes, so cleanly you hardly even get any black on your pots. Sixteen fluid ounces of naptha lets a Svea cook two hot meals a day for more than a week.

Many of the cautionary statements that apply to a Svea apply equally well to other white gas stoves. Expect to spill some fuel when you're filling the stove. A small screened funnel weighs almost nothing and really helps avoid this. Don't light the stove in the same place where you filled the tank, and always cap the fuel bottle and set it down a safe distance away before you light the stove. I was careless about this with a Coleman camp stove once and will never forget the feeling I had when I saw the flame trail head for the gas can. Fortunately it stopped a foot or two short.

Several models of gas stoves today are designed to burn more than one grade of fuel. Don't use anything but white gas unless you're truly desperate. Heavier fuels like kerosene or even regular gas create unpleasant fumes and soot. After using them, your stove may need a rebuild.

I'd be cautious of any stoves that have a separate fuel tank connected to the burner by a hose. On flat ground that may work fine, but in many places you won't find flat ground, and a tank that can roll away probably will, in the dark, to where you can't find or recover it. Having spent a lot of time fixing things, I also don't trust hoses and especially not fuel hoses. Connections tend to fail, and a leaking hose means a good chance of an uncontrolled fire.

I've included several videos in this article, and honestly I thought the Svea film would be the scariest one of the bunch. Well, I was wrong. The guy lighting the Svea really did use way too much gas (all you need is enough to fill the drip ring) but I've done far worse without getting blown up. The Svea is built to take it, but I'd still be cautious. Take an eyedropper along and use it to fill the drip ring around the burner stem, and no more than that. It really doesn't take much to pressurize the tank enough to get the stove going.

The hose and tank problem is well illustrated in a later video clip, with an exemplary disaster exactly as I imagined it might happen, and there's another film about a pretty little stove from Japan that I'd have to say I really don't want to even see in a store, let alone light off in the woods miles away from an emergency room. If the park rangers see this one, we'll all be living on cold sandwiches.

Gas stoves are great, but buy one that's simple. Svea owners like Svea stoves well enough that many of us have used ours for forty or fifty years. That says a lot about the product.

Even though I have some misgivings about canister stoves, those arguments fall apart when I take a closer look. I stick with my Svea partly because it's old technology that requires a little bit of skill to operate safely. There's still a little woodscraft involved in it. You have to learn to light a Svea, as you have to learn to build a wood fire.

Canister propane or butane stoves are simple. You screw the burner onto the fuel canister, open the valve, and light the stove. Nothing to it -- some even have piezoelectric spark ignition built in, so all you do is turn the valve and push a button. The burn time isn't great, with some stoves running on tanks that will only last an hour. That hour of burn is very efficient. A person with a canister stove could be eating a hot meal while the Svea owner is still tuning up. In subzero weather you'll be struggling with the Svea, but canister stoves will light right up.

The weight of a canister stove is negligible. An ultralight version could tip the scale at six ounces, counting a four ounce fuel canister. That should be enough fuel for a weekend outing, with some to spare. Longer treks mean devoting more space to fuel, because the pressurized canisters do take up some room and you can't ethically leave them behind in the woods, but the advantages mount up. Butane boils at about four degrees fahrenheit, and propane boils at about forty below zero. The only reason either one is a liquid in the fuel can is that it's packed under pressure. As soon as you crack the valve, the gas begins to turn to vapor. Fuel vapors burn efficiently. In older gas stoves you waste quite a bit of fuel heating things up to the vapor point. With a canister stove you don't need to preheat the fuel or pressurize the system -- it's already done. Flash, boom, and you're cooking. When you're done, close the valve and disassemble the stove and the tank's pressure valve seals the fuel up tight.

So there's very little art to it. It just works. You may have a little trouble judging how much fuel you have left in the tank, which will cause cautious people to burden themselves with too much fuel. The can and the burner comprise a big percentage of the load the stove represents, and since you'll be packing the empty canisters out that weight stays with you. You can complicate things a bit with multi-fuel models that run on both white gas and propane/butane mixtures, but when you add hoses and alternate fuel tanks you just add weight and potential leaks. Simple stoves last longer, and some of the simplest are the featherweight canister stoves.

Always take ordinary firestarters like matches or lighters along, just in case the fancy piezoelectric igniter stops working.

It's interesting to see how many people who demonstrate these devices seem nervous, almost as though they expect something to go wrong. The young man in the video above obviously expected an explosion, but not one of the amplitude he got. It doesn't take much to light a canister stove. Just crack it open a little bit, and light it immediately. Don't wait for the vapor cloud to grow. These stoves are easy and safe if you use the right procedures.

The next video is a composite of the things you really shouldn't do, including trying to blow out the fire. There's a valve for that. It's easier to remember the valve if you aren't standing in the flames.

You might think, considering that the rules about campfires often only exclude open fires and fire rings, that campstoves are a lot safer. Backpacking stoves look a lot safer than they are. Anything that creates an invisible cloud of explosive fumes or a flammable trail of spilled fuel really is a fire hazard. Responsible people practice with their stoves, in a safe and well ventilated area, and master the lighting procedure before taking them to the woods. Don't just read the manual -- memorize it.

The worst experience I ever had with my Svea was one Spring about two years after I bought it, when I thought I'd fire it up on the sidewalk outside the apartment to see if it still worked. I hadn't become completely bonded to the procedure and I didn't feel like hunting up the manual. I thought I could figure it out easily enough.

Open the valve, sure. Heat the tank. Let a little gas drip into the ring and light it off, there you go.

Let me stress that this is not the right procedure, and the fellow who designed the Svea is probably rolling in his grave right now thinking of the consequences of what I did that morning. It's actually more like Heat the tank, open the valve, fill the drip ring, close the valve and light it off. Then after that first flame dies down you can open up the valve and light the stove and in a minute or so it'll settle down to that nice blue flame and jet plane roar.

What the Svea does if you light it like I did that morning is to spurt flaming gasoline repeatedly in whatever direction it happens to point. If you back away quickly, as I did, it builds a protective pool of burning gasoline around itself. It's way too hot to touch at that point and even under good conditions when the area isn't on fire it's sometimes awkward to fit the turnkey on the valve stem. When both are hot enough to cause third degree charring, it's even trickier. But you have to do something, because eventually the pressure will exceed the strength of the tank and terrible things will happen. My solution -- not a brilliant one, I admit -- was to wrap a 100 percent flammable cotton bandanna around my hand and reach in through the flames to find the key and turn off the gas. I managed it without catching myself on fire.

Then I ran and hid around the corner of the building, because there was still a big pool of flames and nothing I could do except watch from what seemed like a safe distance as my stove got hotter and hotter. Eventually the fire burned out. I let the stove cool, and with the correct instructions fresh in mind, lit it off. It worked perfectly.

Anything built that well is something I will keep. I doubt that the company has lowered any standards over the years, but do not ever test a Svea or any other stove the way I tested mine. Most will not pass that test. Memorize the correct lighting instructions and follow them.

Remember that gas fumes are heavy. Fumes from spilled fuel collect in depressions in the terrain as well as in enclosed spaces like tents. If you need a place out of the rain to cook a meal, building one is safer than using the vestibule of your tent. If you knock over your fuel can and pour half the gas on the ground, that's a potentially explosive fire hazard even when you're outside. Set up your stove away from your other gear and consider how you might put a fire out if things got out of control. The instinctive solution is to run when things go wrong, but the smart solution is probably to turn a valve off, quickly.

Then, of course, you run.