How do you make a campfire?
First, you should pick an optimal spot to locate your fire. It should be
somewhere in your campsite that makes the most functional sense. It should be a
relatively clear area, and if there are no clear areas in site, remove as much
debris, and overarching branches and leaves as you can.
Once you’ve established the campfire’s location and cleared the area of any
unwanted debris, you can do what many camping enthusiasts do next – use local
rocks to make a circle around the area where the actual fire will burn.
Assuming you’ve already done the hard work (OK not that hard) of gathering wood
and other material to burn, take that wood and stack it up into different heaps
away from where your fire will eventually burn. As a general rule, such material
should be dry, not too heavy, not green or freshly cut.
What kind of wood is best for a campfire? Often survival experts will categorize
wood into three types – tinder, kindling and fuel wood.
Tinder generally consists of small twigs, dry leaves, dry grass, needs, bark,
link, wood shavings or other small woody items that are easy to collect and easy
to burn. Kindling is a step up, it usually consists of larger wood items,
usually small sticks, perhaps a few inches to perhaps a foot or so in length
(note: these are not hard and fast rules), and usually with diameters that allow
you to easily grasp them with one hand (perhaps an inch or so diameter). Fuel
wood is the campfire workhorse – it is larger, heavier and denser and, as the
phrase “fuel wood” implies, it is the fuel that keeps the fire going for hours
and hours at a time.
To get the fire going, you are going to need a way to ignite your wood to get it
burning. Ignition requires nothing more than heat. So in practical terms, you
will need a way to generate enough heat to get your tinder burning. You can
generate heat with matches or fire starters, or through friction.
Assuming you have included matches in your camping supply kit, or some type of
automatic fire starter, getting your campfire going should be fairly easy. Light
your match (protecting it from the wind if you have to – shield it with your
free hand or some other handy object if you have to) and use it to get your
tinder burning.
To make things easy, its’ a good idea to have the tinder piled in the center of
your ring of rocks (called a “fire ring” by camping enthusiasts), in fairly
loose piles. If you make it too dense it may be hard to ignite. Once your tinder
is burning, add the used match to the pile and let it burn too. Now, add more
tinder to your fire, slowly so as not to smother the nascent flame. To help the
fire along, blow softly at the base of the fire – this will introduce more
oxygen into the fire, helping it burn better. Be careful when doing this – there
are two things you don’t want to do – those 2 things being burning your face or
inhaling the smoke. After exhaling, turn away from the fire and smoke and try to
inhale a clean breath of air, so as not in inhale the smoke and fumes.
Next, with the tinder burning, begin to slowly add the smaller pieces of
kindling wood first. Again, you don’t want to make the pile too dense. Leave
space for enough oxygen to get into the wood structure for a better fire. As the
fire gets stronger, increase the size of kindling you add to the fire, until it
is strong enough that it can sustain itself. Once you’ve reached this point,
it’s time to begin adding the fuel wood. Do this by adding one piece of fuel
wood at a time. Be mindful of the density of the woods structure you are
building. If the wood is too close together, you are making it harder for oxygen
to circulate, making the fire weaker. Allow for enough ventilation.
And there you have it – you now have a nice, warm fire for your campsite. Before
ending this article, we’d like to close with a few words on two of the most
common campfire configurations. One employs a crisscross pattern, in that wood
is placed crisscross fashion, allowing for a long lasting fire that produces a
lot of coals. Another takes its name from the camping shelters traditionally
used by Native Americans. Often called a tepee fire, as the name implies, wood
is placed nearly upright, with each stick supporting the other, in tepee fashion
(think of a cone made of wood, with the base of the cone touching the ground and
the point facing the sky). These types of fires are good for cooking, especially
because they concentrate heat at the tip of the cone.
