Dangers
- See also: Campfire safety
Special precautions are required for camping in bear country because cooking activities and food storage attract these potentially dangerous animals. Food preparation and storage must be located a safe distance from sleeping areas, so a fire near camp cannot be used for cooking. Food needs to be stored in bear cans or bear bags hung from a tree or post. Other animals may be attracted to food too; most notably raccoons, squirrels, skunks, and mice.
Outdoor cooking elements can be of danger due to their high flammability and proximity to occupants with no fire alarm warning. Use of highly flammable alcohols to refuel portable cookers, gas cookers need to be checked for leaks and kept well away from tents in a sheltered and stable setting. Keep tents at a safe distance from cooking utilities, ground camp fires and make sure they are properly extinguished before resigning to sleep. Wind can carry hot embers, it is recommended to draw a circle of safety. Avoid open ground sleeping next to a camp fire, campers have been known to roll in their sleep towards the heat source including sleeping bags catching fire. During a study most of the contact burns inflicted had a relation of 81% to intoxication, oppose to the flame and flash burns comprising just 11%.
A number of incidents involving camping and fire have resulted in fatalities and severe injuries.
Read more about this topic: Outdoor Cooking
Famous quotes containing the word dangers:
“Anyone with a real taste for solitude who indulges that taste encounters the dangers of any other drug-taker. The habit grows. You become an addict.... Absorbed in the visions of solitude, human beings are only interruptions. What voice can equal the voices of solitude? What sights equal the movement of a single day’s tide of light across the floor boards of one room? What drama be as continuously absorbing as the interior one?”
—Jessamyn West (1902–1984)
“One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.”
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
“Monarchs ought to put to death the authors and instigators of war, as their sworn enemies and as dangers to their states.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)