If it’s around 8 p.m., you hear a helicopter overhead and the faint gruff voice of Steve Earle coming from the heavens, you better make sure that you’re not camping illegally or sitting around an illegal campfire.

The initial fire attack teams take smoke flights every night during a dry spell, which we are currently feeling, said Dave Smith, fire and vegetation specialist with Parks Canada.

“We do a smoke flight every night when we’re in high or extreme fire danger and the reason we do an evening patrol is obviously to look for smoke, but also to look for illegal campers,” said Smith.

Peering through the windows of the helicopter, three members of the initial attack team spend about 30 minutes in the air, surveying the townsite and outlying areas, looking for anyone camping or building fires. The crew knows all the popular spots, even the hidden or hard-to-get-to-ones.

Tues, June 9, was the first capture of the season, with the initial attack team spotting an illegal fire and camper up on the bench by Patricia Lake and called in the wardens.

Both illegal camping and illegal fires are offences under national park regulations, said park warden supervisor Jim Mamalis, and therefore require a court appearance by the offender. The maximum fine is $2,000, said Mamalis, but the “last little while it’s ranged from $100 to $500 depending on the circumstances,” he said.

“The only place you’re allowed to have fires is in a fire pit that is provided by Parks Canada,” said Smith, adding that approximately 90 per cent of wildfires are started by illegal campers who don’t put out their fires properly.

“In the situation that we’re in right now,” said Smith, “where we’re in high and/or extreme fire danger, one of the reasons is that we have a very high drought code and the drought code is part of our indicators that deals with what’s happening in the organic layer in the surface below the ground,” he said. “That organic layer right now is very, very dry and the result of which is that if a fire isn’t properly put out, it will dig into that subsurface and it’ll burn underground until it finds some kind of fuel that will bring it above ground. When that happens, next thing you know, we’ve got a fire,” said Smith. It might be two or three days after the camper has left the site that a fire erupts, he added.

The rogue camper found last Tuesday also had an outstanding warrant in the province of Alberta, said Mamalis, so he was arrested and taken into custody. Mamalis also said that the man partly pleaded ignorance and didn’t want to pay for camping.

There’s three main categories for those camping illegally said Mamalis. Those that don’t want to pay or can’t afford to pay for a camping permit, or simply don’t like the noise of the campgrounds. The next group are those people that simply don’t want to be found. “They don’t want to be seen or found,” said Mamalis. “That’s why sometimes walking into the bush and dealing with these guys is a little bit risky. You might be dealing with one of these guys that’s on the run from the law,” he said.

The final category “that we find of these folks is people that just arrived in town, they’re looking for a job, they don’t have any money, they don’t have the resources to find a place to stay temporarily, so they’ll camp in the bush, sometimes for a couple of weeks,” said Mamalis.

Although not quite at the stage of instituting a fire ban, if conditions remain dry, a ban could come within the next month, said Smith. “We have finished our prescribed burning for the summer, so if people see smoke, we would very much like to hear about it,” he said.

“We had a very, very, dry spring. We’re probably at about 50 per cent of our normal precipitation for May and the first half of June and those two things together result in us being very dry and so any fires that do happen, there’s a potential for them to get up and create a real wildfire situation for us,” Smith said.