The pines out west might be different than the ones here in the south, but the pines here dont make very good good fire wood. The creosote plugs the stove pipe up in no time at all, and we actually had a very small fire at our shop as a result of tht one time. Since then we try to avoid pine firewood. We generally burn oak or hickory when we can.

Ppine, if you're interested in another odd taxonomy situation (in the animal world) where splitter and lumpers disagree rather strongly, look into the corn snake classifications with regard to the great plains rat snake.