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,
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