NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Park and Recreation Structures

TENANTS of campsites, and of those cabins so compact that kitchens or even kitchenettes have been omitted from them, necessarily must be furnished with a means for cooking meals outdoors. The facility is a campstove, and while it has much in common with the picnic fireplace found in parks, there are points of dissimilarity which really differentiate the two.

The chief difference is the height of the cooking surface above the ground. It has long been urged that picnic fireplaces, especially where they are massed in great numbers, be kept low in height so that they are no more obtrusive in the park scene than they need be. The admonition seems fair enough, since a picnic fireplace is used by a picnic group for only one or two meals on a brief outing and any inconvenience caused by the necessity of stooping during cooking operations is offset by the aesthetic benefits to accrue from thus subordinating utilitarian facilities to the natural features of the picnic ground.

Campstoves, on the other hand, are used for a stretch of days or even weeks by camping parties or cabin occupants, and with them cooking becomes a more laborious business than merely warming up picnic fare that has been prepared largely at home. Campstoves are likely to be regarded by their users rather as kitchen stoves set outdoors, and any gestures made toward park environment that result in decreasing their efficiency and convenience will be condemned, and the shortcomings be retailed to all and sundry who will listen. Moreover, campstoves will be on, or hard by, sites that have been rented out for a term of days or weeks, and, in the broad sense, thereby withdrawn from public use. Campers, with some logic, will incline to wonder why any facility they have engaged to themselves by rental should acknowledge any other factor than all possible efficiency and convenience in use. If this attitude is to be met with a conciliatory gesture, the height of cooking surface of campstoves will approximate that of kitchen ranges.

The typical campstove is built of stone and, by reason of its size, cannot be the mortarless piling of rocks that produces the well-naturalized picnic fireplace. All the principles of sound masonry must be acknowledged in constructing it. The surfaces should be true and plumb, the joints solidly filled with mortar, and any top surface on which cooking utensils might be set should be level and reasonably smooth.

The chimney so abhorrent in connection with picnic fireplaces will not be held beyond the pale in devising a campstove 100 percent acceptable to the camper. The cooking surface of campstoves is better a solid iron plate or casting than an open grate of bars or any perforated sheet. The effectiveness of the chimney in drawing off smoke is problematical if the top of the stove is not solid. An arrangement sometimes adopted is a bar grill directly beneath a solid top, the latter hinged so that it can be raised and rested against the chimney, and so that the bar grill can be used when the draft is favorable. In more primitive campstoves the front is left open, but better control of draft results when it is closed and equipped with a fuel door and an ash door having an adjustable damper. An adjustable damper in the chimney flue is a further aid in this purpose.

When rain overtakes a picnic, it can be laughed off as all in a lifetime, and the picnic can be postponed or gone through with as its collective temperament may determine. But if rain intrudes on a vacation of the tenants of a park cabin that is not equipped for indoor cooking, nothing less than a sheltering roof over the open air campstove can stay the vacationists' wrath. After all, if the camp-stove must have a chimney—and this is very generally conceded—a roof can make the combination a more sightly thing, as several small stove shelters illustrated among the plates which follow prove. Another advantage offered by a sheltering roof is the fact that it makes possible keeping a supply of dry fuel immediately at hand. When the preparation of three meals a day is involved, this is no minor convenience in some climates.

The campstove raised to convenient working height and outfitted with a chimney and a roof, as desirable accessory features, attains a size that invites the challenge that its bulk goes way beyond its function. This may be true if the flue serves and the roof shelters only one campstove. The retort courteous and forehanded defense is to group two or more stoves together and then hope that camping neighbors do not demand the complete isolation that picnicking neighbors are believed to seek, and that the former will share the stove shelter in common and in peace. There are obvious advantages fewer sources of fire hazard, smoke annoyance, and damage to trees and roots. An operation that, in a frank analysis, is of "nuisance" character is concentrated by this solution.

Where rainfall is heavy, it is sometimes chosen to construct in picnic areas the equivalent of sheltered campstoves instead of low open picnic fireplaces.

When built with only one stove under the sheltering roof, what amounts to an individual picnic kitchen is the result. Two or more stoves under one roof produce a structure that is a well-recognized type, several of which are illustrated in the section "Picnic Shelters and Kitchens." These might serve in a campground or colony of cabins that lack kitchens as advantageously as in the picnic area.

The tailpiece illustration pictures the coupling of a practical cooking facility and a masonry hearth and reflector for the evening campfire. The type is built in some of the western national parks. Its chief advantage is that it induces campers to build their campfire in a predetermined location and tends to prevent a wantonness in fire building that quickly destroys the natural values of the campground. Fire hazards are reduced when facilities of this type are supplied. With its metal stove and smokestack, the contraption is not a thing of beauty, but in most campground developments practical, and not artistic, considerations rightly have the call.

Crater Lake National Park

• Plate III F—1 — Plate III F—6