There were some state forestry type people in Portland who told me a few years ago that the big key to them coming down on "squatters" out in the hinterlands was finding and taking or destroying any stockpiles of firewood that they find. That's the one "prep" they figured out people are unlikely to carry in to their wintering over campsites and pre-stage ahead of time.

If they see stocks of firewood stacked up in hidden away type places, they figure that's going to be someone's "squatting" or hideout location and calculate how long someone would plan on staying by counting up the firewood.

At one point I did a recon of the old Diaxaris location, where Strat had made sure to stock up plenty of firewood for the winter of 2014-2015, by mid-2015, the wood had been hauled off. Satellite imagery now shows the place with no firewood stacked around.