TRANSCRIPT:
You’re listening to Parks and Landmarks, an exploration of the underrated, outdoors. I’m Sean Bull
If you’re listening to this live, today is the first day of the 2022-2023 winter season. The sun was above the horizon for its shortest duration all year, and boy does it feel like it! Lawns are packed down with snow, ice rinks are starting to open, and I’m just starting to hit the point where it’s too cold to get ice cream on a whim. In this weather, I have to build up my temperature with a good snowshoeing sesh before heading to my nearest Chocolate Shoppe. Rob will tell you in a few minutes exactly what kind of winter we’re heading into, so I won’t belabor the point, you get it.
There are a few winter experiences that are essential to Wisconsin, things that everyone should try to do during their time here. Some of these are obvious, like building a snow sculpture, or skating on a frozen pond, but some are more easily overlooked. For instance, I think just about everyone can and should spend an hour or more soaking up the warmth of a bonfire on a below freezing day.
Modern heat is easy to take for granted. Sure, we all appreciate the feeling of radiant warmth, slowly thawing us as we enter a building from some time outside, but we give little thought to it after that moment. A fire on a cold day is different. Without walls to define a heated space, the near-infinite chill constantly presses in, and even strong flames can only barely keep the elements at bay.
In an advanced society, there are often calls to reject modernity, to seek experiences which call back to the simpler lives of our ancestors. I don’t personally believe there’s much to be gained from eating uncooked cow livers and sleeping on a dirt floor, but a fire feels primal in a way that’s relaxing, rather than challenging. Gazing into the flames, it’s easy to imagine your ancestors gathered together, hundreds or even thousands of years in the past, doing much the same thing as you. We may never invent time travel, but with combustible materials and a spark, just about anyone can fashion the next best thing.
Of course, depending on where you live, you might not know of a good place to make your fire. If you live in Madison, or any city, really, your options can be quite limited. After some trial and error, I’ve learned that our local fire departments frown on simply setting a pile of things alight on your lawn, they ask that you burn in a fire pit, or similar enclosed vessel. As a quick tangent, I’ve never understood why a dumpster fire is so commonly used to mean a disaster. Sure, an unplanned dumpster fire is bad, but of the things in a city that could burn, a dumpster seems pretty manageable, right? It’s an enclosed, metal container, very resistant to fire damage, and some even have wheels; they are by design easy to relocate. Anyways, if you don’t have a place to put a fire pit, don’t start trash fires, I guess. I’m leading up to a better idea here.
Several local parks have fireplaces built into their main shelters, but unfortunately, those close to public use over the winter. So to start a fire this time of year, you need a park with fire pits separate from a shelter. Within the city of Madison, Hoyt Park is the best place to go for this need.
Hoyt Park is a forested thirty acre plot of land, set in the hills of Madison’s Near west side. If you take Regent Street west past West High School, it passes a graveyard, some houses, then turns into the driveway of Hoyt Park. This was originally one of Madison’s pleasure drives, a precursor to the parks system that let residents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century escape the city for an afternoon at a time. This particular drive led out of what was at the time the west edge of the city. People could look further west from the top of the hill, and admire the farms and countryside below. This lookout still exists today, though some might argue its view of Hilldale Mall is less picturesque than it once was.
In the early 20th century, the private Madison Park and Pleasure Drive Association transitioned to being the city’s parks division. With broader use and a bigger budget came more infrastructure, and in the 1930’s the Civilian Conservation Corps built a shelter, tables, and a dozen freestanding stone fireplaces, scattered around Hoyt Park. When people think of the CCC’s work, they think first of their work on the national parks, or things like the bluff trails at Devil’s Lake, but they weren’t limited to projects that large in scope. The CCC was everywhere, and with a little maintenance from the modern Friends of Hoyt Park, their creations still stand today.
The stone and wood shelter is a handsome building, and the best preserved of the nearly century old structures, but that’s clearly not what I’m focusing on today. The fireplaces are made of rough hewn sandstone, each a little different from the next. Most sit in little clearings under Hoyt’s tall canopy of trees. Some have a modern park picnic table, but others are accompanied by stone tables that were cut at the same time. These are huge slabs, which look as much like a sacrificial altar as a place to put your s’mores supplies. The stone in the park was mostly sourced on site. Before Hoyt was ever a recreation space, it was the site of one of Madison’s first quarries. You can still see the scars of this industrial past, the place where the rocks were originally now shows as a twenty foot cliff, which runs along most of the park’s northern edge.
A fireplace isn’t universally better than a fire pit, but these do have their advantages. Smokeless fire pits have gained a lot of popularity over the past few years, and I can attest, they live up to their marketing departments’ hype. When constructed in the right way, a fire pit can burn so efficiently that it gives off nearly no smoke to those gathered around it. But a simple chimney whisks away smoke just as well, if not better, than any space age $400 steel bowl. The shape of a fireplace also protects its fire from light rain, wind, or snow. Sure, they’re not portable, but fireplaces are ideal for permanent installations like these.
Most times of the year, you can find quite a bit of fire material at Hoyt. It has as many downed limbs as any wooded park, and plenty of dry castoff pine needles and oak leaves to get you started. However, over a typical Wisconsin winter, these things get wet, and buried by snow, so it’s best to bring your own things to burn. Unless you live within a few miles of the park, you should buy your wood, specifically wood that is treated to remove harmful pests. The wood sold at your nearest grocery store or gas station is perfect for this. It’s usually kept out of the rain, and certified safe to travel with. While you’re shopping, there’s no shame in picking up a bottle of barbecue lighter fluid. I know what I said earlier about connecting with our ancestors, but that’s just the end result we’re going for, it doesn’t matter how you get there. Most of the paper products in your recycling bin make a nice, dry fuel, but if you don’t have enough on hand, you can always buy a newspaper as you gather everything else.
Building the fire is the easy part. Simply stack your wood with room to breathe, then crumple paper up, and use it to fill the space between. Ideally, you need some sticks as well, something to bridge the gap between paper and logs. However, these can be hard to source, so your best bet might still be to forage for downed branches around the park. When your pile is complete, you can spray it with lighter fluid, then crumple up one more piece of paper, light it, and add it to the pile.
Over the past couple years, I’ve gotten fond of a rechargeable electric lighter. It’s basically a tiny taser, and its little arc of lightning is capable of starting everything from campfires to candles. Unfortunately, it can only maintain the voltage to do this if its battery is above a certain temperature, so I was disappointed to find it inoperable on this occasion. Regular matches or butane lighters will work fine here.
A couple notes on lighter fluid: though I have found that it’s one of the best things to supplement a struggling winter bonfire, I would be irresponsible if I didn’t tell you not to add lighter fluid to a fire that’s already going. There’s always a chance that as you squirt it onto the fire, the flame could travel up the stream into the bottle, which could then explode in your hand. That said, it’s also important to know that lighter fluid won’t easily light off anything but an open flame. If your fire has some embers at the bottom, and your lighter fluid soaked logs won’t seem to catch, you may need to light another piece of paper, just to have a flame for the fluid to work with.
A winter bonfire is an experience unlike any other, and Hoyt Park is the perfect place to try one for yourself. The park is open from 4am to 10pm year round. I’ll link more information about it online, at wortfm.org.
If you’d like to suggest a topic for Parks and Landmarks to cover, please send it my way, at sean.bull@wortfm.org. Tell me about your favorite underrated spot outdoors, or whatever you feel is related. This segment’s title is intentionally broad, so just go for it. I’d love to hear from you guys. Again, that’s s-e-a-n dot b-u-l-l at w-o-r-t-f-m dot org. For WORT News, I’m Sean Bull.
