Building Campfires
These days, with all the fancy campfire accessories you can purchase, campfire building looks paltry and tedious. But what if you were caught out in the open without any of your fire building equipment. Knowing how to build a campfire properly can spell the difference between life and death in extreme weather conditions.
Handy Campfire Accessories
In the good old days without gas torches and matches, building a campfire was an essential to most outdoor activities. A campfire was protection against the cold and provided the means to cook warm dinners and make hot coffee for everyone. Campfires were places where everyone gathered around and warmed up.
Campfires were also protection from wild animals. Most wild animals are not keen to approach a fire which is why a lot of campfires were left burning during the day.
Matches are cheap, convenient and widely available so the art of building a campfire with traditional means has been all but lost. However campfire making is a skill that is still as relevant today as it was 100 or more years ago.
The biggest trick to getting a campfire going is to get them started quickly. A fire needs three things - heat, oxygen and fuel.
Oxygen is abundant all around us but is not always readily available to a campfire. Arranging the fuel properly is crucial to ensuring adequate oxygen supply. You can increase the supply of oxygen by blowing into a cinder or fanning a blossoming flame.
Heat can be generated by friction. An assortment of methods are available to generate this heat such as rubbing two sticks together, flint stones and other techniques such as the bow drill method. All of these techniques won't mean anything unless you have the right fuel supply.
Your fire needs fuel to keep on burning but you aren't going to get a fire going by applying heat to a large log. To get the log burning you need tinder. Tinder is just easily combustible materials that will burn quickly and hopefully pass on heat and gases to the larger pieces to get them burning. Great sources of tinder are small pieces of bark, dried out moss, dry leaves twigs and sticks.
A common rule of thumb for tinder is anything that is thinner than a matchstick. Anything else will be too hard to light, especially if it's damp.
Common Designs of Campfires
Teepee - These are easy to
setup and are great for quick fires. Teepee fires need a
lot of tinder so make sure you have a fair size bundle
before starting. Larger, longer pieces of fuel are
balanced against each vertically in a teepee shape. Tinder
and smaller pieces of wood are placed underneath the
larger pieces to make sure the larger pieces get the heat
and gases to burn better with. Most commonly teepees are
used for general purpose fires and are great for boiling
water.
The trick to a successful tee-pee fire is to start small and gradually add the larger logs as the fire gets going.
Pyramid - You build up the campfire by laying logs horizontally on the ground together then building another layer on top but slightly smaller width. As you move up you gradually make a pyramid shape. Pyramid shapes are harder to start up but create a lot of charcoal which has many uses. When burning it is a very stable fire.
Parallel - Two logs are layed in parallel and the tinder is layed between them. It's an efficient burning fire as the insides of the logs burn as well. This is an excellent fire to maximize your fuel. To increase burning times lay the logs close together to reduce oxygen use and slow the fire down.
Star - Typically seen in the old western movies. Logs are laid out in a spoke or star fashion and the tinder is placed in the middle. The fire is easy to maintain as you simply just need to push the spokes into the fire as needed.
Remember to treat fire with respect as it has the power to save or destroy. When finished with the fire be sure to douse it completely with water or bury it completely with dust and dirt. Unattended fires can cause massive damage and loss of life so take extra precautions to make sure this doesn't happen.
If you would like to find out how to be prepared to light a fire anytime anywhere in all sorts of weather conditions check out our campfire accessories page.
For other camping ideas check out camping equipment.