I'm in the camp of it's reasonable to vary one's strategy, depending on the destination and nature of the trip. Do I think relying on cookfires is "cheating?" No, so long as it's a match for the region being traveled. Good technique will leave behind no premanent damage.

I'll never be a hypermiler (there are no 30+ mile days left in my legs) but occasionally tackle trips where every ounce makes a difference due to the physical challenges. For those, I parse the ounces and the weather forecast closely and trim, trim, trim. But more typical are simple backcountry getaways and I'll pack whatever suits my fancy (still taking light stuff but more and better food, warmer clothes, gadgets, etc.).

I understand the self-sufficiency appeal of wood stoves and while I don't own one, I wouldn't mind giving it a try. My scouting years were in the Cascade foothills and we plowed through vast amounts of wood for cooking, campfires, drying soggy clothing, building structures, etc. It was second-growth alder and cedar forest that had once been old-growth Doug fir, and there was literally an unlimited supply of wood because the forest was in transition back to Doug fir. I'll guess the Boy Scout guidelines have changed a lot since then, and I'll also guess that patch of forest is now a suburb of Redmond.

Today I primarily hike the Sierra Nevada where easy wood exists in lightly traveled areas and in areas crowded with undersized second-growth trees, but more popular areas are generally stripped of easy wood or are alpine and never had wood to begin with. In some areas fires are banned completely or limited to below a certain elevation.

With this crazy quilt of conditions and regulations it's not easy to rely on cooking fires, but it's still at least possible. A couple summers ago I took a trip where I forgot my stove canister (duh!) and had to cook with fire instead. Every site had an existing fire area and wood was easy to find, so I had a lot of fun rediscovering long lost skills. The smoke was also nice for driving away clouds of mosquitoes.

I guess I don't have an overall point, just that I've considered LNT to be an unobtainable goal intended to keep us thinking about how to minimize our impact and going further, consider ourselves stewards (leave our sites nicer than we found them). Without hovershoes and zepplin tents we're always going to leave some sign of our passing, and I don't consider that a failure.

Politically we're seeing renewed pressure in the House to "open" more Forest Service and BLM land to motorized travel, and that's what I'm fretting about these days. I just love being called "elitist" by somebody who owns a $40k custom 4x4 rig towed to the mountains behind a $50k turbodiesel truck, hellbent on conquering them there hills.

Cheers,