How to Prepare a Campfire

Hey guys how is it going? Today I’m going to be making a small campfire. I’ll be showing you some preparation and basic fire lighting skills. The first thing you want to do is choose an area to light your fire. This is one most likely to be a big factor and where you choose to set up your camp. You want to find a relatively level of spot. Somewhat dry as dry as possible actually and away from trees and things that makes it on fire when you’re not watching the fire. Also where I’m making mine for this video is pretty close to a water source so I can quickly put out the fire if I need to. Another factor to consider is an area where there maybe a lot of dry wood around. You don’t want to make it in a spot where you have to hike a mile to bring back wood. It’s usually inst a problem but that’s also a factor to consider when choosing a camp and where you’re going to make your fire. So the first thing you want to do is clear the fire area of any debris. And as you can see its pretty well cleared out. And also it might not show off on camera but the leaves in the ground are still pretty wet. We’ve got a decent amount of rain, that’s just going to make it a little more difficult to start the fire but it won’t be a problem. And it’s good to practice in wet and rainy conditions because you never know if you would have to start a fire in those conditions. Next you’re going to wide gather some various rocks so you can make a wall around your fire. If the area where you’re making your fire is very dump you’re going to want to put a platform of some kind down to keep it dry. You can do this with some sticks lighting them up in a row or a better option would be a flat dry rock like this and you can just lay and use it as your base. All right, so now I’m going to start making the wall of the fire with all the rocks I collected. There’s many different types of set ups for a fires. It depends where you’re using it for to cook food, to stay warm etcetera, all of the above. It all depends. For this video, I’m just going to make a basic circle. So there’s where I’m going to be using today. It’s a good idea to put the biggest flattest rocks at the bottom. Also if you’re in very cold conditions and you’re sleeping near the fire you can put a reflector on one side of it to reflect heat back towards where you’re laying. This reflector is by no means finish. It’s just there as an example if you would obviously want to built it up as big as you can. Next we’re going to look for wood to get the fire but before you even strike a match you need to get everything pretty much ready. You’re going to need tender, candling, small fuel and large fuel. On the way in, I already grab my tender, it’s the birch bark and here’s a quick clip of that. Right here is an excellent example of a white birch tree and you can peel the top layers of bark off for your fire. Another thing to remember is, when you’re out there hiking and going to your destination and you see tender out there grab it because you don’t know if it’s going to be at your camp or near there. You need to take advantage of the situation why you can't. Next is going to be your candling. You want it to be is dry as possible, small as possible when you first put it on the tender. Maybe to fixed size or even smaller and you want to find it off the grounds so you know it’s dry. Also when you snap it, it should make a crisp noise like that so you know it’s really dry. If it’s bendy and it doesn’t make a good snapping noise and it’s probably not very dry. Also hollow plants like this, this was actually still standing and this will go up and flames instantly. This is an excellent candling. It’s larger but its hollow and it’s really dry. So plants like that are very good. A really dry grass like this is will fall under the tender category but it’s excellent. It’s a really crispy and dry. Another thing you can do to help get your fire going is making feather sticks and that’s what this is right here. And I am by no means the best of this so that’s what it looks like and you do this by making little notches with your knife in the wood. All right so remember, when looking for fuel and other wood, standing dead wood is your best options because it’s off the ground when it rains. It dries out faster. All right, so here some of the wood I’ve collected and various piles from smallest to largest. Like I said earlier, you want to have most if not all your wood ready before you even light one match or strike the fire still. A lot of people rush too fast and they just got a couple pieces of wood and it ends up going out and that’s some waste of your resources and matches. So you want to have everything ready to go and preparation is the key to fire lighting. Also if you’re staying the night in cold conditions or even regular conditions, you want to get maybe three times as much wood as you thought you would need because you will go through a very quickly and you’ll run out. And if you don’t have a flashlight, you’re heat it a lot most likely. So get as much as woods as you can before the sun sets. And now we’re ready to light our fire and to do this, I’m going to retrieve my large fire steal, Swedish fire steal for my survival kit and remember you can use the items in your survival kit. It’s good to use them and practice using them all the time. So you’ll know its there when you need it the most and you’ll know how to use all the items.