Okay, so I'm going to be pulling out some of my Girl Scout Troop Leader expertise for you in this article! When you think of camping, what's the one thing nearly all camping experiences have in common? (Hint - it's in the title of this article and probably why you clicked "Read More") Yes - it's campfires!
Whenever we're camping, the fire building duties usually fall to me, and now that the kids have gotten older, to them as well. If you had to name the three most important things for making a roaring campfire, what would you say? (Various types of flammable liquids are all WRONG answers!) In our family, we make our fires without the assistance of such things like lighter fluid, gasoline, etc. We use the driest tinder, kindling, and fuel-wood we can find or buy - using twice as much tinder as kindling, and twice as much kindling as fuel-wood. (Tinder is the really small stuff like twigs and dry pine needles, kindling is the small-medium stuff with a diameter of the size of your fingers or slightly larger, and fuel-wood is the big stuff - the diameter of your forearm or larger. You can use a tee-pee or log cabin method for building, but whatever method you use, the key is to get everything set up and ready BEFORE you strike the first match or click the flame-clicker. The success of a fire relies on the set-up before it's lit. The most common problems in fire starting (in my experience) is being impatient - lighting the fire before there's enough of all types of fuel set into the fire ring; or using too little of tinder or kindling. If you use very little of the small stuff, it will burn to ash before the big stuff has time to catch. I've seen a certain someone (not mentioning any names here) try to start a fire with three wads of newspaper and a 6" diameter log. . . uh, fail.
So . . . aside from using enough dry fuel in your fire setup, what can you do to make your fire starting a little easier? What can you do to keep your fire going as long as you need it to?
1. A good fire starter! This is something that lights easy, but is slow to burn. Sometimes the wood you buy in packs at the gas station or in the National / State parks have a little fire starer disk in the pack. If not, you can make your own and it's SUPER easy. Girl Scout trick coming right up. If you don't have any - find someone with kids and ask them for some of their broken crayon stash. (You know every family with kids has a broken crayon stash, right?) So, get a bunch or if they're not broken, break them into pieces. Take the pieces and roll them in wax paper so they look like little Tootsie Rolls. Voila! You now have a collection of fire starters. When you begin to build your fire, put a handful of these little guys spread out on the bottom of your fire, under the tinder, and maybe a few between the tinder and kindling. The fire starters will burn longer to make sure your kindling and fuel-wood get a nice good start from the slow burn.
2. So, if you got your slow-burning fire starters in there, and some nice dry tinder, kindling, and fuel-wood; what else do you think can make your campfire the bomb-diggity of campfires? Well, you also need to make sure your fire has a steady supply of oxygen - otherwise the fire will smother itself. Once the tinder and kindling have caught and are burning steadily, it's common to see people blowing or fanning the fire. Additionally, the fire might need to be rearranged from time to time - adjusting the location of certain logs, opening up the middle to let more air into the center, or lifting some logs up to let air under them. Have you seen people using a long stick or some other "tool" to move logs around unsuccessfully? Well, there's a tool out there that can help you provide oxygen to the fire as well as help you arrange the logs without burning yourself. It's called a "fire stick." It has a claw mechanism on it so that you can adjust it to pick up and move logs around, and when it's extended, you can direct the tip of it into the fire and blow into the other end to blow air right into the fire exactly where you want it. I will say that this gadget takes some practice to utilize the claw feature - for some reason it works backwards to me. When I think I need to slide my hands together to make the claw clamp down smaller, it opens wider and drops my log. Grrrrr. It just takes a minute to make your hands do what they need to do. The blow feature works fine, as long as you take note of the hole in the bottom and point it in the right direction - otherwise you'll be blowing ashes and embers back at you
3. If you are REALLY uncoordinated and just can't get the hang of using the fire stick (or you know better and don't even want to try) there's another alternative for safely arranging and rearranging logs that are literally on fire. This is another tip I learned from the Girl Scouts and I SWEAR by it. Actually, this is one of the best Christmas presents I've ever received from my husband. . . and it's . . . WELDING GLOVES! Mine are like this http://amzn.to/2cMhVdr but they're orange instead of blue. They allow me to just reach into the fire and adjust things as needed. All. Night. Long. Love them! They are also great for when the fire is roaring and just too hot to get in there to roast that last marshmallow. :)
