How to Make a Fire in Snow

How to Make a Fire in Snow Hi. I’m Ali from Fitclimb and today I’m going to show you how to build a fire in the snow. The first step is to find a good flat spot and if you can't find a good flat spot, you have the shovel or even your hand you can use just try to make yourself a nice platform. I’ll go about 3 feet by 3 feet especially if you got a big group. You want the whole group to be able to keep the flame. I’m going to show you how to build today is going to be called the squall wood fire basically we’re breaking dead branches off the tree. You can also do split with fires but I’m not going to show that today. It takes a lot longer to do. Squall wood is pretty fast, easy. The wanting you want to remember when you look for a tree with dead branches it should get break easily. You know its dead because there won’t be any green on the tree as far as like a branch like this that has green pine needles. That branch is alive so I’m not going to take it. One is bad for the tree. Two, it’s not going to be good for your fire. The other thing you want to remember when you’re breaking off branches of trees if you have sunglasses wear them. Always break away from your eyes. So if you’re breaking toward yourself, you can get debris in your eyes so I’m just going to find a small tree, find from there and discuss way to branches off. The key here is try and be organized because you’re going to have turn yourself back to cut with this. You notice I’m also wearing gloves. That is to protect my hand exactly too thick or strong for me. I’m not going to obviously going to be alone. Try this one, get one here. So three things every fire needs. Keep you an oxygen and right now, I’m going to work on the get a good platform down so my fire doesn’t really melt through the snow and what ends up happening is this fire heats up, you’ll start melting the snow and the flame gets too low for the rest of the wood so you want to be able to keep that flame on the fuel to have a good healthy fire. So to get a platform, you could use lots of different materials but right now I finally set some and a lot of times you can just break off the bark. That bark makes it easier to break off, as a survivor you’re not going to get injured while you’re doing that. You could also break pieces of wood off and put those together. The bigger your platform the better your fire, the more you cushion it is going to be the easier it’s going to be able to build. Sometimes I might break the wood, it’s rotted. Leave it alone. Don’t worry about it. It’s time to another spot and trying to get another piece out and the bigger pieces of the bark that you can get off the better. Okay, you got your platform. You got your wood, time to start cropping your wood. The main thing to remember is I want to get in the three or four distinct sizes. I this, I would crop more of medium size which is about thumb size and diameter to bring your size in diameter. There are also pieces that are pencil size and I just break those apart trying to be filling need about it and organize and get my paws and then you have the bigger sizes, bigger than your thumb size and you’re start getting it the arm size. Those are the last stage in your fire. The other thing if you notice in the Pacific Northwest where there’s a lot of moth on its wood, on a dry daylight today this is great stuff and you can actually use it to start your fire. It’s called the goat’s beard. In fact, I’m going to save a little bit of that for my tinder and put it on my tinder pile. The thing to remember when you’re building a fire, you want at least three times more wood than what you think you’ll need especially on the smaller pieces because you don’t want to start your fire and have your flame go off and you have to start gathering wood all over again and suddenly you want an extra assurance to get right just the first time around. So I’ve got my tinder, got my smaller pieces. The other thing I want to mention is, typically you want your pieces to be 12 to 18 inches long so that our flame spread over the wood. Today we’re going to start a fire with a magnesium sidecar or metal match. The reason I like this is even if it’s wet outside, matches won’t light but this will light even if it’s soak and wet. It lasts a long, long time. I could get about 15,000 sparks of one small piece when some of the smaller pieces are only two inches long. This one is four inches long and you’re going to need a knife. It takes a little bit of practice, I suggest going home in your backyard and practice it not inside the house until you get down the technique. The technique is to scrape 90 degrees with your knife. It will all dwell up your knife style. Always carry a knife shark nor I have two knives one for my metal match and then one for everything else but you’re going to scrape 90 degrees with your knife to the metal match or the magnesium stick and then to create a spark. You want to push hard even though I go light. I still create a spark. The spark won’t be as hot so push hard and slow. I’m going to take my tender, aerate it, get some air in there if it’s wet outside I wouldn’t use. Goat’s beard I would use something like paper or manmade tinder or accelerant. Usually cut involve salt and Vaseline, it works really good, just store them in a Ziploc bag. The other thing I want to mention is hold your knife on an angle as you go down so a lot of beginners, what they do is they smother out the flame that they just built with their own knife blade. So if I hold my knife on an angle I stop just short of hitting the bottom of my tinder and only the sparks it so what I’m going to do is once I’m just going to keep going, don’t give up, it could be frustrating at first and if you don’t get a flame just got to keep trying. Sometimes in survival determination is what went over knowledge and then once I get a flame, I'm going to flip over my tinder because I want my tinder flames are obviously going to move upwards. I want my tinder over the flame. So here we go. A little bit of smoke and we got flames. Don’t forget to put away your knife and metal match. A lot of survivors this is where they lose stuff in the snow and then you don’t have it for your next fire. If your wood was organized well, you’ll have quick access to it. Remember oxygen so you want to brace. I grab my smaller pieces of wood, set it in there, not completely flat. Subtle, smother out the flame. Be patient. How do I know when to put on then get more wood when the flames breakthrough so as the flames catch the wood and you’ll hear the wood start to crackle and then the flame has breakthrough, that’s a good time to take more wood, put on more wood. I just kind of spread it out so there is some dead airspace between the wood. Now realize this would be a lot more difficult if there was snowy nor rainy on me right now. I have to take extra step to get under a tree maybe and keep my wood dry but if you follow the right principles it doesn’t matter how much rain we should still be able to get a good fire going. Now I’m ready for my next pieces and I’m just going to build a large cabin or a pyramid fire and I just put in the—