A Brief Guide To Building a Great Campfire

Building a good fire for your camping tour is not just a fancy party trick to impress the other campers. While camping gear today make the most traditional campfire making look ridiculous and tedious, how to build a good campfire can make the difference between life and circumstances of death extreme.


In addition to the simple days, and less complicated, when the matches and gas flares were a luxury, but of building a good campfire was essential for any outdoor activity. This is where the heat sough everyone against the surrounding cold, and where people have found ways to cook a hot meal for everyone. Night temperatures can be very unforgiving, and camp fires provided a way for everyone to gather and keep warm.

Apart from heat, camp fires also repelled wild animals. Wild dogs, lions and other animals are not willing to approach a campfire. Therefore campfires are still allowed to burn into the night.

While the art of making a campfire was almost forgotten - partly because games began to appear more practical - a campfire as a skill that is always relevant and essential to any camper repertoire of tricks.

First, the secret of campfires is starting to kick-start. You can only do this if you have a solid understanding of what is necessary to start a fire - heat, oxygen and fuel.

Oxygen, while around us, is not always readily available to the campfire, you may have to hold the fuel so that it has adequate air supply. You can also complete this offer by blowing into a cinder, or kindle a fire already booming.

Heat is typically generated for a camp fire by friction. You will probably use a variety of methods to generate this heat - rubbing two sticks together, using flint stones, and other techniques. However, it will not give you a glorious fan flames if you do not have the right fuel.

Fuel is what keeps your fire burning, and find the right type of fuel is an integral part of your efforts in building and maintaining a fire. Build a fire in applying heat to newspapers is not going to work. You will need tinder. Tinder is easily combustible materials that burn quickly and hopefully emit enough heat and gases to start a fire with chunks of wood.

Ideal tinder includes dry sticks, bark, dry leaves and twigs. Use kindling to start the fire and help maintain. But remember that you can successfully build a fire if the larger, harder to burn pieces of wood burning.

Some common conceptions of campfires include:

Tepee - teepees are great for quick fires, and long into the night. It uses a lot of tinder, so you'll need a good group of it. The firewood is placed longer, balanced against each other around the tinder vertically. This ensures that the heat and gases of the tinder are generated to help the larger pieces of firewood. This is the perfect fire for boiling water and campfires for general use.

Pyramid - Building a "pyramid" of newspapers laying the papers horizontally on the ground together, then build another layer on top of the next gradually forming a pyramid. Although this type of campfire is a bit difficult to start, the advantage of such is that it generates a lot of charcoal, which will be useful in the future. It burns very well and is quite a steady fire.

Parallel - Parallel fire sets the tinder between two newspapers. This is effective as a fire burning inside the log burn too - have the fire and the heat goes into a good comfortable place between two logs.

Star (Indian) - This is the type of fire you usually see on those old western movies. Newspapers are arranged like the spokes of a wheel. Lighter is placed in the middle. The fire is easy to maintain, even if you do have to push each "spoke" of the wheel in the middle as the fuel burns.

Conclusion

There are other types of campfires, all with specific purposes. But as with any skill outside, creating and maintaining one of them takes much practice to get right. And as mothers tell their children generally do not play with fire. Treat it with respect, as it has the power to save and destroy. Remember to follow safety precautions after using a fire - extinguish the fire with water or bury the remains of a campfire with dust and dirt. The fires left unattended can cause serious damage to property, so always take precautions that nothing that should not be burned is burned.

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