Ada County, ID Outdoor Cooking: Smoker Rules (2026)

Section 2-2-5(A) of the Ada County Code, part of the Ada County Parks and Waterways ordinance covering Barber Park, the Greenbelt, Hubbard Reservoir and the rest of the county's park system, restricts fires to culinary purposes in gas and charcoal grills. That means a park visitor can grill on a gas or charcoal unit but cannot build a wood campfire, use a fire pit, or burn debris without the Director's sign-off, which the code limits to educational, interpretive, or other special programming purposes rather than routine cookouts.

Every fire the Director does approve carries three running conditions: it must stay under control at all times, it must be extinguished before the person responsible leaves the site or whenever the site sits unattended, even briefly, and the Director can shut down fires across some or all park areas during extreme fire danger, at his or her sole discretion. Given how much of the county's park system sits near the Boise foothills wildland-urban interface and dry grassland along the Boise River, that discretionary closure authority matters most during red-flag fire weather.

The rule sits inside the broader Fire, Firework, Firearm, And Weapon Restrictions section, so a grill fire that gets out of control or is left unattended can trigger a more serious penalty than the section's fireworks violations, because subsection D treats fire violations under subsection A the same as the section's firearm-and-weapon violations rather than as a lighter infraction.