How essential is a campfire to camping in Minnesota?

For more than a century, Camp Fire Minnesota has been gathering kids on the shores of Lake Minnewashta, in Excelsior, for a classic sleepaway experience: swimming, archery, kayaking, and, of course, campfires.

As darkness falls and the flames rise, kids sing and sway, settling like the logs.

“There is an almost overwhelming sense of comfort around a fire,” says Camp Fire’s senior naturalist, Will Toney. “It’s the easiest way to get 200 kids to be completely silent. At least until the s’mores come out.”

Across the country, however, the campfire has been flickering out, smothered by growing wildfire, climate and health concerns. Burn bans, especially in the West, are increasingly common. Three times in the last few years, Outside magazine has called for an end to campfires.

For many Minnesota campers, that prospect has prompted a kind of dark, flameless night of the soul. Who are we without fire? Is it even possible to enjoy lake country, the North Shore, the Boundary Waters, without a campfire?

And what about those s’mores?

The answers may be as unsatisfying as a snipe hunt. “Each year, there have been more and more times when we’re not allowed to host fires,” Toney says. “As something the kids expect and appreciate about camp, it’s really hard when we have to say, ‘No, sorry, it wouldn’t be safe to have a fire.’”

Karen Harrison, the DNR’s wildfire prevention specialist, says any decision to curtail campfires is taken seriously, involving a kind of war room of state and federal agencies, sharing data on fire danger and preparedness. Ultimately, it’s the DNR commissioner’s call.

Only about 3 to 5% of wildfires in Minnesota are caused by campfires, Harrison says. (The most common cause is so-called “debris fires”—people burning leaves and such.)

“Campfires, when done properly, aren’t really that high of a concern,” she says.

In fact, even as wildfire risks have grown in Minnesota, wildfire itself has not, which suggests we are already changing our relationship to fire, the wild, or both.

Aaron Klemz likes to bring steaks for the first night in the Boundary Waters. “I put some frozen ones in my pack, and by the time I’ve portaged to the first campsite, they’re thawed out, ready to go on the fire,” he says.

“It seems like human instinct to gather around the hearth,” he says. “I could stare at a campfire endlessly. It’s like outdoor television.”

But the Ham Lake Fire, in 2007, got his attention. It began with a campfire left smoldering by a Boundary Waters veteran.

Klemz is more careful with fire now, even if he says, “I have not changed or reduced the number of fires I have.”

Don Shelby, the erstwhile anchorman for WCCO-TV who has become a kind of ambassador for the outdoors, used to camp with little more than a tarp, a cookpot and a piece of flint. Now he uses a campstove.

Shelby, who lives in a LEED-certified house and drives an electric car, says his views on fire have evolved. Not because the climate is changing: A campfire’s carbon footprint is tiny compared to driving to the woods, he notes. But because camping itself is changing.

“The modern-day camper should never have the necessity of building a fire,” Shelby says, though he also concedes: “I understand part of camping is nostalgia. ... It can feel incomplete without a fire.”

If nostalgia is all that remains of our need for fire, however, it’s still a powerful need. Eric Kolcinski, a co-founder of Native Fish for Tomorrow, a rough-fish advocacy group, recalls a recent camping trip with anglers who rarely bother with fire anymore.

They were headed to bed when someone asked: Want a fire? “Heck yeah!” Kolcinski responded, and within 5 minutes they had one. “It was very primal,” he says.