Years of outdoor experience don’t prevent spectacular mistakes, but they do make for unforgettable campfire stories.
Story By John Quillen | Photograph by Molly Herb
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 5 (September/October 2026)
It started as a conversation over breakfast with Cityview publisher Nathan Sparks and editor Kirk Edwards. Somehow, we got into the topic of old school backpacking gear. Nathan was telling me about an antique Svea stove he once had. My friend John Dempsey still uses his. The ignition process is borrowed from NASA. It involves the atomization of whatever liquid fuel you’re using and potential loss of eyebrows.
That led me right into my story about an old Whisperlite stove. It borrows the same principle of light and hope. Back in the early nineties, outdoor technology had not quite evolved to the simplistic canister stoves we presently enjoy. The Flaming Tent
One weekend I was doing a backpacking loop which concluded in our final night at campsite twenty-nine on Maddron bald. Accompanying me on this sojourn was a coworker named Philip. The weather was typical Smokies: off and on thundershowers with the occasional respite. The last tent pegs were being hammered into the ground, when a monsoon began in earnest. Philip and I slung waterlogged packs into the tent, falling over one another to escape the deluge.
Starving from the long day’s slog, we began to turn our attention towards dinner. This storm had also settled in for the night. I had never cooked in a tent before, but this one was seemingly designed for that purpose. It was a gift from my Aunt Shelby for Christmas to me and my brother Todd. It sported the unique feature of having a zip out area on the floor for cooking. This was critical given the priming delicacy of a whisper light stove. I attached the white gas bottle and began slowly pressurizing the system, Philip decided to take advantage of this opportunity to step outside and visit nature. He must have had some premonition about what was soon to happen.
I looked like Wile E. Coyote after he mistimed a fuse on his ACME trap.”
I unzipped the vestibule to create cross ventilation, cognizant of that danger. When enough Coleman white gas was released into the priming cup, I grabbed my lighter and began the ignition process, as I had done hundreds of times. Everything seemed okay until I noticed that some of the fuel had spilled out onto the actual tent floor. In a matter of seconds, the entire domicile was ablaze. I started throwing our bedding out onto the raining ground as melted nylon dropped like napalm onto my face and hair. Philip reeled in horror as I sat there on my hands and knees, in the midst of a flaming ruin trying to save our gear from vaporizing. I looked like Wile E. coyote after he mistimed a fuse on his ACME trap; crouched inside the bony, dripping remnant of a shelter, with singed hair and eyebrows. We laid that evening beneath charred frame poles, draped with rain jackets as trickling rain cooled my now burned forehead. Runaway Ski “Look out below”
I would like to say that’s the only mistake I’ve made in my outdoor life. However, many years later, on the slopes of beautiful Mount Rainier outside Seattle, we came pulling into Camp Muir after an epic day of ski mountaineering. The mountain held its largest snowpack in decades. So expansive in fact it took us an extra 4 hours to reach our camp from which we were going to attack the summit.
Both Brian Moran and I had summited this peak before. This was merely a side quest en route to our main objective. We were heading to Western China to do this for a month. Rainier was going to be our fitting out ground. Although I’m a fairly good downhill skier I didn’t have a lot of experience going uphill on them. With 55 pound packs, the slog into camp ate most of our day. We found ourselves arriving as the waning sun began to drop into the Pacific. Our peak plans came into question.
Were it not for having to catch a flight the next night half way around the world, we would have pushed on, but I think we made the right decision to make high camp our summit on this climb. I was exhausted and for once, didn’t care that we weren’t going for the top. We dug a camp at 10,000 feet in the shadow of Mount Shasta and Hood, settling into our tent for the night. Our neighbors’ headlamps bobbled up toward the summit crater like ants after midnight.
“All these misadventures make for good campfire stories. But the real truth is that we do it just for the pure hell of it.”
It was a great summit night for them, and we congratulated many of our new friends on their descent as we lounged about sipping coffee. Not in any particular hurry I indulged the second cup. We packed up the tent and all our belongings and I anticipated a beautiful and flawless ski descent back down to Paradise Ranger Station. After all that was why we were here. The rising sun was making those snow conditions just right. I figured it wouldn’t take me more than 20 minutes to float this hard-earned ground from the previous day.
Brian took off ahead of me on snowshoes as I started securing the skis to my boots. A day hiker was coming up the glacier and started asking me about my ski plan. That’s when I laid the second one down and started to step into it like I just stepped off a gondola. Because they weren’t traditional downhill skis, they were unequipped with brakes. And we both froze in horror as my single ski launched like a projectile down toward a throng of ascending mountaineers.
It’s funny now when I think about a queue of hikers approaching this very important marker on their ascent, now having to dodge this missile coming down off the side of Mount Rainier. But it wasn’t so funny then when I had to walk down with one ski and a full pack to retrieve it. My ski descent was shot. If there was a positive aspect it is that no one was injured by this ignorance except me, my pride, and calf muscles carrying skis downhill after toting them up for no reason now.
This was truly a harbinger of events for me a couple of weeks later in China . I didn’t realize that I would also be coming off a big mountain called Muztagh Ata with one ski but for a different reason as has been mentioned in a previous article. The Making of Great Stories
Someone once dubbed mountaineers as conquistadors of the useless. In this realm we employ tools that seem to have zero real-life application. Be it blowing up a tent or sending an RPG down the slopes of Mount Rainier, these mistakes in no way translate to my daily world. But I know why we put ourselves through this. All these misadventures make for good campfire stories. But the real truth is that we do it just for the pure hell of it. It’s kind of like slamming your hand in a car door. It feels so good when you stop, scrape the nylon from your forehead and sling your skis into the rental car at the end of an adventure.
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