Don't move firewood: buy it where you burn it

What rides along in a load of firewood

Insects, egg masses, and fungal spores overwinter in and under bark, and none of them show from the outside — wood that looks clean can be carrying plenty. The two names worth knowing:

The emerald ash borer is the reason whole streets of ash trees are gone across much of the country. An infested ash loses most of its crown within two years and is dead in three or four, and the beetle's spread across North America has tracked the movement of infested firewood, logs, and nursery stock — not its own wings.

The spotted lanternfly works differently: it lays gray, putty-colored egg masses on nearly any flat surface — firewood, trailers, lawn furniture — and the eggs hatch wherever the surface gets parked. It feeds on grapes, fruit trees, and hardwoods, which is why the states fighting it take the egg masses seriously.

The Asian longhorned beetle and the spongy moth round out the list, and both still have federal quarantine lines drawn around them. But the pest doesn't have to have a famous name for the rule to hold: firewood is how forest pests travel.

How far is too far

The Don't Move Firewood campaign's rule of thumb, and the one you'll hear from rangers: 50 miles is too far, 10 miles or less is best. Buy or gather wood near where you'll burn it, burn everything you bring, and don't carry leftovers home or on to the next stop — leftover camp wood is how a pest finishes the trip you started.

The rule matters most where the wood ends up furthest from a gate: if the trip ends at a dispersed site instead of a campground, nobody checks your load but you. Our dispersed camping rules by forest cover the rest of that trip — how long you can stay, the setbacks, and where the fire answer lives.

The exception is packaged firewood that's been heat-treated and carries a USDA APHIS or state heat-treatment seal on the label. The heat kills whatever was living in the wood, so sealed heat-treated bundles are generally fine to travel with — and at a campground gate in a quarantine area, they're often the only outside wood allowed in. "Kiln-dried" alone isn't the same claim; look for the treatment seal.

What a quarantine actually means

When a damaging pest turns up, the federal government or the state draws a line around the infested area — a county, a group of counties, sometimes a whole state. Inside the line, life goes on; what's regulated is what crosses it. Firewood is almost always on the regulated list — often all firewood, not just the pest's host tree, because nobody at a checkpoint can tell split oak from split ash at a glance. Moving it out without treatment or a permit is a violation, and "I didn't know" doesn't usually help.

The map of who regulates what has changed in recent years. The federal emerald ash borer quarantine ended in January 2021, with the beetle already established across most of the country — so today's EAB rules are state rules, and they differ at nearly every border. Spotted lanternfly quarantines are state rules too. The Asian longhorned beetle and spongy moth quarantines are still federal lines with exact boundaries you can look up. Which is the practical point: whether a rule applies to your load depends on where you are, and the only current answer is the agency's own map.

Check before you haul

Two minutes before you load the truck:

• The Don't Move Firewood state map — click your state and the one you're headed to for a plain-words summary of each one's firewood rules.
• APHIS's Asian longhorned beetle quarantine map and the spongy moth quarantine map — the current federal boundary lines.
• APHIS's emerald ash borer page — the federal picture, with the state-by-state work.
• Your state department of agriculture — state quarantines start, grow, and end on their schedule, so the state's own page is the current word on what you can carry in or out.

We don't restate state quarantine rules here, on purpose: those lines move, and a stale "you're fine" is worse than a link to the people who know. Check the agency, then load the truck.

Buying for the season instead?

The buy-it-local rule pairs nicely with buying smart: the firewood BTU chart shows how much heat each species actually gives you per cord, and the best-firewood guide sorts out heating wood from fireplace wood from the never-burn list.

None of this says whether you can light a fire tonight. Campfires and brush piles run on county burn bans and forest fire restrictions — check your county, and on public land check the current restriction stage before you light.