A guy I know was out hiking with friends last weekend off Highway 410, near trails used by dirt bikes and ATV riders, and was surprised to come upon a bunch of people firing guns.

Certainly this couldn't be legal, my friend thought, and later asked me that very thing.

Well, my friend obviously isn't a hunter. Yes, of course, it's generally legal to use firearms on federal and state land, with the obvious caveat being that you don't do it near a campground, you don't shoot across roads, a body of water or into a cave (duh), or in a manner exposing any person or structure to the line of fire. Recreating (including target practice or, in season, hunting) on public lands is all about using common sense.

This weekend, that common sense will need to lean more toward the conservative side. There will be more people out there in the boonies, camping, hiking and fishing -- meaning a lot more unintentional targets.

And another thing: South-facing slopes below 3,500 feet have been baking for weeks, which primes the fuel for something far more terrifying, and with the potential for far greater destruction, than errant bullets: wildfire.

When things get hot and dry, it doesn't take much.

A cigarette carelessly tossed from a window ... anti-mosquito citronella candles that blow over in the wind ... tall grass that gets caught in the catalytic converter of a car being driven through a field, cooks to a crisp and then falls out in burning bunches.

Forest Service enforcement officer Blair Bickel remembers a case in which a fire was triggered by people target-shooting at a stump. And even a camping accessory as seemingly innocuous as a generator, he says, can become a fire hazard.

"People aren't thinking about the hot exhaust that's coming out of that generator," he says. "It's just like if you parked your car and let the exhaust blow long enough at one spot, you can preheat the vegetation there. We're going into a very, very dry period. When it's really hot and dry and you have very low humidity and you use anything that's likely to involve heat, you might start a fire."

So might thunderstorms, which struck areas of the Naches Ranger District on both Sunday and Monday nights. So far there haven't been any reports of fires caused by lightning strikes -- but if you're out there camping or otherwise playing in the boonies and see smoke or other evidence of a possible outbreak, report it immediately to the Central Washington Interagency Communications Center at 800-826-3383.

For now, there are no campfire restrictions on the Naches or Cle Elum ranger districts. But making sure a campfire is dead out must not be the no-brainer it should be, because people with brains keep taking off and leaving behind campfire embers that flare back up.

And this weekend the fire danger will be at its highest, because of knuckleheads with fireworks.

Yes, my friends and I loved getting stupid with fireworks when we were kids, but stupid remains the operative word; I almost put my brother's eye out with a bottle rocket, and we're lucky we didn't start anybody's houses on fire.

But then we grew up.

Knuckleheads, though, never grow up. In 2005 nearly 2,000 structure fires were caused by fireworks; the next year nearly 10,000 people were treated in U.S. emergency rooms from fireworks-related injuries.

It's illegal to use fireworks on almost all public lands, including state parks and national forests. A tinder-dry forest temporarily populated by the charter members of Morons R Us -- their motto being "Locked and Loaded (particularly loaded)" -- is a disaster waiting to happen.

And watching our forests burn isn't what Francis Scott Key meant by "the twilight's last gleaming."

* Outdoors editor Scott Sandsberry can be reached at 509-577-7689 or ssandsberry@yakimaherald.com