Fire Building | Basics
Today we are going to talk about that all important thing that man can create but animals can’t… FIRE! That’s right folks. There is nothing that can make an evening in the great outdoors more pleasant than a fire. Actually a fire and a cup-O-joe. Fire building is an essential outdoor skill for survival, cooking, protection from animals at night and most importantly… a place to stare as you slip into a state of nostalgia. Fire building isn’t an inherent skill like talking, it is a skill that must be learned and perfected. If you live here in the damp Pacific Northwest, you have got to have SKILL at fire building or you will go cold. Note that I will touch on fires in survival situations at a later date.
After reading over this there were a few spots where I thought, “I wouldn’t do that backpacking”. So, some of the info here also depends on what type of camping your doing. You won’t be carrying that 30 pound dutch oven in your backpack, but will be using it car camping. Common sense is the mother of many lives saved.
So to begin with, lets talk about some general safety rules. These are a great place to start out in your fire building skills. Once you get your Boyscout Master Firebuilder Badge you can decide for yourself if building a fire on the roof is safe or not.
- You must make sure you know the fire rules for your area as some areas have seasons when fires are banned.
- You want your spot to be about fifteen feet from any trees, fallen logs or bushes. This is important because, as happened to me one time, The fire can follow the roots and cause a larger fire than anticipated.
- To state the obvious, never build a fire under branches or near grass and weeds.
- Use rocks or a hole to confine your fire pit
- keep your fuel and wood about ten feet away from the fire
- Build a fire only large enough to meet your needs. The seven-pallet, gasoline drenched, lit by throwing a maltoff cocktail fires like the ones I did in high school should only be lit in the nostalgic memories of my mind… another words, never try something that stupid! It is the grace of God that I am still here.
- going back to #6, To much heat makes it difficult to control the cooking temperatures. Most cooking is done on coals not a direct flame.
- Never leave a fire unattended.
- Always have a bucket of water and a shovel nearby
- Make sure that dadblasted fire is dead out before you leave. You cannot cover the fire with rocks and think its safe to leave. It needs to be completely out. Also, if your backpacking or in the wild, make sure that not even the animals can tell that you had a fire. Return the wild site to it’s original state.
So, all your pre-trip planning has paid off and you have arrived at that pristine camping spot that can compare to no other. First thing to do after camp is setup is turn your attention to the fire. Your most important task now is to build your…
Wood:
First thing you want to do is plan where the wood pile will go. I have found that a lot of the time I under estimate the size of my future woodpile and by the time I get a hefty load, it is a foot from the fire pit. make that woodpile away from the fire area.
Next we need to search for wood. There are three basic types of wood that we are going to gather. Each of these types of wood is a link in the chain to a great fire. You need them all because you just cant hold a lighter to a 1 foot diameter log, trying to start a fire, for any length of time without the lighter cooking the meat inside your hand instead of the meat you brought for dinner.
Tinder
Tinder is used to start the fire. Tinder is usually things like dry grass, birch bark, dry ground bark or wood shavings and small twigs (smaller than your little finger).
I use a homemade concoction here. I make it different depending on if it is for car camping or backpacking. For car camping, I fill an ice tray with lint from the clothes dryer. I pack it in as tight as I can get it. I then pour melted paraffin into the tray and let it cool. These babies will burn long enough to get even the wettest kindling going. For backpacking just use mini-ice trays or dip dense cotton balls in the melted paraffin.
Kindling
Kindling ranges in size from the little finger to about the size of your wrist or ankle. I have been to a few places where this is the size of the fuel due to a lack of wood. You are basically using kindling to feed the fire until it is big enough to burn large pieces which is our fuel.
Fuel
Anything bigger than the wrist is fair game for fuel. Fuel is what keeps your fire going. Once you have the fuel on, the more fuel you have stockpiled, the longer you can maintain the fire.
Types of Fire
Now that we have learned about what types of wood there is to make a fire with, we will look at the different types of fires to build, and there are a few. First, you want to make a frame on the ground of kindling logs about maybe a foot or half of a foot long. This will be in the shape of a triangle. Each stick end will rest on top of the next creating an air breather hole. Now, within the confines of the area you delineated on the ground with the frame, you want to build a…
The Teepee is your basic fire setup to start other fires. You start by placing your tender in the center of your frame. Next, you build a teepee out of kindling and fuel over the tinder. This fire gives a high flame.
The Log Cabin is used to make a real good bed of coals. You start with your frame, then build the teepee and finally build a log cabin up and over the teepee. Eventually your structure will look like a beaver den.
The Crisscross is also used for a good bed of coals for a dutch oven or roasting. Take your small fuel and stack a row of pieces side by side. place a teepee on top of this layer of fuel. Build alternating layers of fuel around and up over the teepee to cover it by at least three crisscrossed layers.
The next step would be to light the fire. Did you actually leave a place to light it from? By far, the most critical moments in fire building are from the moment you get it lit until you have good size fuel burning. You will need to continually feed this baby kindling and then fuel. Coals will eventually build enough that logs that are placed on them ignite. At this point you can take a breather. Your fire is roaring and your feeling mighty hungry.
Now that the basics are out of the way, I will say that I usually bring a large bag of charcoal to add to the fire when it is really wet out. The charcoal helps dry the wood out, but is mostly used to make the fire Dutch Oven ready. This is the very basics of building a fire. There are a lot of advanced things I did not get into. We now know how to build a fire. Work on it, perfect it. Eventually you will be able to start a fire with nothing.
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