Let's Set Things On Fire

We've had a lot of fun on this here blog recently, going on about camping and camp fires and such and a few dear readers who are in the exploratory phase of wishing to go outdoorsing have asked:

Great! So...how do I build a fire?

You've come to the right place. Destroying things by fire is a specialty here.

In outdoorsing and camping, there are 4 kinds of fire for cooking, telling stories, drinking beer, and being generally relaxed:

1. A-Frame, or, Teepee
2. Square, or, Log Cabin
3. Cheater
4. Fuck It

Additionally, in outdoorsing and camping, there are 2 places in which it is acceptable to light a fire:

1. A DNR- or National Park Service-prepared steel and cement fire ring at an official campsite
2. A small, very burned looking circle of stones or ancient, rusted-through steel ring at a National Park Service-designated backcountry or dispersal camping campsite

DO NOT.

If it's not on this list, and you're not on the show Alone, please don't.

Now, Smokey Bear will tell you that the 4 kinds of fire are Teepee, Lean-To, Log Cabin, and Criss-Cross. Smokey Bear is indeed an authority on fire, but I believe his authority more leans towards forest fires and their prevention. In all my years of camping and fire-making, the Lean-To and Criss-Cross are really just what happens to the A-Frame fire when it really gets going and all your carefully stacked and balanced wood collapses. Which it will. 

In fact, after the fire is lit and is at the point where you're adding "fuel" -- by which I do not mean gasoline, but instead I mean increasingly larger logs -- all fires really just become Fuck It fires.

The Fires

A-Frame and Log Cabin fires are the romanticized Scouting type fires. You need 4 things:

1. Tinder
2. Kindling
3. Fuel
4. A thing that makes heat

What are Those Fancy Words?

Tinder: dry pine needles, dry leaves, dry grass, itty-bitty twigs, dryer lint (I'm not kidding...bring a bag of that stuff in your camping gear), ripped-up newspaper or pictures of people you loathe; things that are tiny, DRY, and absolutely will burn, quickly

Kindling: Sticks and equivalent things made of wood, about as big around as your pinky-finger. 

Fuel: Sticks and equivalent things made of wood, of variable size, from about as big around as your thumb, to your wrist, to your forearm, to your leg. Please make sure it's not your thumb, your wrist, your forearm, or your leg.

A thing that makes heat: matches, candle-lighter stick thingy, lighter, flint-and-steel, white phosphorus grenade

The Process

1. Make a pile of tinder, like about as big around as your hand (unless you have tiny hands), about fist-or-so-high. More is better.
2. Have a bunch of kindling nearby. Stack some of it loosely around the pile of tinder like a tent.
3. Light the tinder with your heat-making device. Light it in multiple spots.
4. As the flame grows, stack more kindling around it, again kinda like a tent. You know: an A-Frame!
5. Keep adding that, layer by layer, as it catches fire, and your pile will look more and more cone-like.

Now here's where it gets different:

YES. This is perfect. Then just keep adding bigger
wood in this pattern (heh..I said "bigger wood")

With the A-Frame, start adding fuel. Begin with stacking 3 or 4 pieces of thumb-sized sticks around your flaming cone of fire. Then wrist-sized. Don't start adding the much bigger logs until this base really gets burning, lest they topple and smother your fire (remember: fire wants oxygen). Keep adding wood 3 or 4 pieces at a time, with a size commensurate with how giant you want your fire, by stacking them on the burning pile of flames bottom-down, point up, so they lean against each other and keep making that A-Frame/teepee shape.

Eventually, the logs are big, the frame collapses, but you've got a big bed of angry-hot coals and flames licking the sky, and you can just toss logs onto the inferno where it feels like you should. Go with it. Your primal proto-human neolithic paleolithic genetic code will assure you instinctively know how to keep a fire going, and your ancient, medieval, viking/barbarian/Greco-Roman/conqueror genetic code will assure you know how to instinctively make a fire bigger/worse.

I mean, make sure it's in a fire ring and not next
to dry leaves...but...perfect example otherwise

With the Log Cabin, start adding fuel. Begin with stacking 2 pieces of thumb-sized sticks parallel just to the left and right of your little burning pile, and 2 more sticks parallel top and bottom. You know, like Lincoln Logs when you made a Lincoln Log cabin. That you've also set on fire. You want those sets of parallel stick to juuuust be touching your burning pile so they too burn eventually. From there, as the fire grows, keep adding larger and larger sticks, then logs, in that same Lincoln Log box shape, each successive layer just touching the flaming layer, until you get to a point where you can add the logs right on top of the burning layer (they're logs at a certain point, and thus strong enough to handle the weight of a new log).

And then, as above: Eventually, the logs are big, the frame collapses, but you've got a big bed of angry-hot coals and flames licking the sky, and you can just toss logs onto the inferno where it feels like you should. Etc etc re: genetic code for fire-keeping and fire-bigger-making.

What's the difference?

A-Frames make a great bed of coals, quickly, for cooking. A-Frames go through lots of wood quickly because....uhh...physics about burning. Log Cabins make for nice, hot, long-lasting camp fires; they take a little longer to get going, but really give you lots of places to keep tossing logs for a nice long night of burning wood and drinking.

The Cheater Fire

Trading Outdoorsiness with convenience. Hey...
It's your soul.

Buy those firestarter logs. Chuck some dry tinder on top. Put some wrist thick logs along each long edge of the firestarter log. Light with heat-making device. Add wood. Feel mild shame, but give no shits because you have a fire.

The Fuck It Fire

Pile tinder. Pile logs all over it. Douse in Coleman/MSR white gas. Stand back 15 - 20 feet,

Still less harmful than Gender Reveal parties

and chuck lit matches at it. After the mild **WHOOMP**, add logs as necessary. Do not do this a Parks. Do not do this. But everyone is tempted because the beginning stages of building a fire takes a lot of TLC and time. You can't just light and walk away. You gotta baby it. Except...here. In this case, you kinda, like, get outta the way.

A note on Things that Make Heat: 

Campfires take a minute. Even with real good tinder - real super inflammable stuff like dryer lint soaked in butane and molded into melted candle wax (yes, that's a thing) - sometimes, you have to light it again, or start over cuz you burned all your GOD DAMN hard-earned tinder before you stacked the kindling right, DAMMIT (this is an autobiographical statement).

Wood matches? Good. They, too, you see, look like and are the size of tinder. Light, bury in tinder. 

Paper matches? Meh. Maybe light the whole packet at once?

Those stick lighters? Fine, great.

Butane fancy-pants lighters or Bic? Fine, just watch your fingers and knuckles as you angle it around.

Torches? ...sure

Phosphorus grenades? Probably illegal??

Flint and steel/starter stick? Awesome and outdoorsy. Hard - you gotta absolutely baby that tinder when the sparks hit and it starts to smoke, but then you feel like a survivalist badass.

That rub-a-stick-real-fast thing? No. Don't. Calories expended versus the calories you'll eventually replace with whatever you cook over the fire? Totally unbalanced. This method is indeed possible but so un-worth it as to be a wives tale or legend.

Related tangent: I have a super fun story about an old friend, an unlit cigarette, a hat made of tinfoil, a metal folding chair, and a thunderstorm. Ask me over beer some day.

In Conclusion

There you have it. Fire-making for you campsite fire ring or backyard firepit. Impress your friends. Cook food like the ancients. Commune with Prometheus and thumb your nose at the rest of the gods.

3 more fire types, for some other day when we talk about survival, or because you pissed off Zeus (see above, re: Prometheus):

1. Lean-to. Good for making fires when it's super windy and/or rainy
2. Cross. Good for tiny little fires when you don't have much wood but need to warm your hands or cook something little
3. Dakota Fire Hole. This sounds...dirty. But this is a family blog, so I can assure you it's a type of camp fire and not, uhh, something else. Good for extremely high-heat fire built in gigantically windy conditions or if you want to build a fire that for some reason you don't want people to see from a distance. Like Zombies or something?