A Folding Fireplace

all photographs by the author

Elevated and contained by the Pack & Carry Fireplace, this campfire  leaves no trace.

By the time I graduated from high school I had studied Latin for five years. There wasn’t much call for it as a spoken language, but I was fascinated by what it revealed about English words. One that I found particularly telling was “focus.” It’s the Latin word for fireplace. When we stare into a fire, it is easy to focus on the flickering flames to the exclusion of everything else around us. At a fireplace we can easily drift into an almost meditative state of relaxed concentration. In the out-of-doors, campfires are an integral part of the restorative quality of the wilderness experience but unfortunately they can scar the landscape. I stopped making wilderness campfires years ago—I’d seen too many campsites spoiled by half-burned logs and black scars on the ground.SnowPeak’s Pack & Carry Fireplace offers us a way to enjoy the benefits of a campfire and leave the land as we found it. It folds up for easy storage and transport and, made of heavy-duty stainless steel, it’s built to last. It has a heft that won’t appeal to backpackers but the durability that comes with its stout construction is well suited to coastal camp-cruising.