Must ... set ... rock ... on ... fire

Here WE ARE, HOURS FROM THE END OF 2003, AND I’M still chewing on New Year’s Eve options. The Montana snow cave approach, for instance, or the South Pacific gambit. Or the flaming desert rock stunt.

Each stands for a certain sort of holiday, and each exerts a certain wouldn’t-that-be-cool? pull -- well, with the caveat that setting rocks on fire is illegal in some places. So which way to go?

It helps, if you’ve been caught flat-footed like me, to remember that New Year’s Eve is an unnatural holiday -- neither a solstice nor an equinox. Chances of a full moon are roughly one in 28. The universe expects nothing from us, even when we think a millennium is dawning. Still, thanks to the way we’ve arranged our calendars these last few thousand years, human nature nudges us away from daily concerns, and we start thinking, however briefly, about transcendence, or maybe just taking a longer view than usual.

I have a mixed record in these things -- a few click-overs on California beaches, watching stars and bonfire sparks; a few on Hollywood Hills rooftops; one in London (where the dangerously dense crowd in Trafalgar Square drove me back indoors); one on a Muslim desert island in the mid-’90s (not much alcohol, not much Dick Clark).

On the whole, I think they go better if you can see the night sky.

And plenty of us are in that habit. By Dec. 15, every available campsite was reserved for New Year’s Eve at five of Southern California’s largest state beach campgrounds -- South Carlsbad, San Clemente, San Onofre, Doheny and Carpinteria. And up at Yosemite (because some people prefer a judicious mix of indoors and out), all the Ahwahnee Hotel’s rooms were spoken for, even with rates starting at $357 for the night.

But a memorable night need not entail reservations, as author David Quammen’s inward-burrowing Montana example makes clear.

It was on the last day of 1975 that Quammen, then in his mid-20s, found himself in Montana at a personal impasse. Then an idea dawned. Instead of spending New Year’s Eve at a party with friends, he drove and hiked through snow to a pass in the Bitterroot Mountains near the Idaho line.

“I had come to insert myself in a cold white hole,” he wrote in an essay that’s part of his collection, “Wild Thoughts From Wild Places.” That is, he built a snow cave, relying on the insulating qualities of snow crystals. Then, using his little camp stove, he boiled noodles and cocoa.

“When dark came I felt the nervous exhilaration of utter solitude and, behind that like a metallic aftertaste, loneliness. I gnawed on my thoughts for an hour or two, then retired. The night turned into a clear one and when I crawled out of the cave at 3:00 a.m. of the new year ... I found the sky rolled out in a stunning pageant of scope and dispassion and cold grace.”

It’s a lot easier to measure the insulating quality of snow than it is to say just what happens inside a human head at a moment like that, but we do have this data: Quammen, raised in Ohio, has lived in Montana ever since.

Holly Bundock’s South Pacific story is about 80 degrees warmer, and it turns outward. Like a lot of other people, she and her husband knew they wanted to be someplace special for Dec. 31, 1999. As veteran employees of the National Park Service, based in California, they knew plenty of special places. In fact, when I asked her back in 1996 to suggest a California campground for the turn of the century, she chose Death Valley, citing all that sky.

But where did she actually go? American Samoa.

She and her husband wound up on Ofu Island, about 2,600 miles southwest of Hawaii. (Yes, there’s a national park there.) Eleven hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, it’s one of the last places on Earth to reach midnight. Between snorkeling the reefs and hiking in the rain forest amid flying foxes, Bundock and her husband glanced at a TV and tracked the millennium as it crept toward them through Asia, Europe, the Americas. For the moment itself, they stood near water’s edge, amid drummers, dancers and fireworks.

They have not moved to Ofu, but they carry it with them.

“Seemed the right thing to do,” says Bundock. “And the islanders really know how to party.”

And so to Joshua Tree National Park. Last New Year’s Eve, always a lively night among the rock climbers who favor Hidden Valley campground, a pair of patrolling rangers spotted a man and a woman wearing headlamps and standing atop a pair of boulders. They were perhaps 50 or 70 feet above the ground, apparently sprinkling liquid from cans. White gas, as it turned out. A moment later, a lighter flickered and flames were leaping from the rock.

When the desert dust had cleared, the fire was out and the rangers had their suspects, who were issued citations. One of them, rangers learned, happened to be Jonathan Thesenga, then the top editor at Climbing magazine. At an April hearing, Thesenga pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge, creating a public safety hazard by discarding lighted or smoldering materials.

The magazine fired him, and climbers debated for weeks over just how much scorn he deserved for making the sport look bad. Others noted that in the spectrum of national park misbehavior -- which runs from littering to meth-making to murder -- Thesenga’s sins were relatively minor. But in a public statement on a handful of climbers’ websites, Thesenga has apologized for his “impulsive, drunken actions” and “poor judgment.”

At Joshua Tree this week, rangers say that they expect all nine of the park’s campgrounds to fill up and that they’ll have augmented holiday staffing in place for New Year’s Eve.

So to review, revelers, our choices are: looking inward; looking outward; and looking through the bottom of a beer bottle, perhaps at something flammable, and perhaps later at a federal magistrate. Or there’s Dick Clark. Best of luck figuring it out, and see you next year.

To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous West Wild columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.