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Hi, I'm Brian with Badger Peak. Today we're going to show you how to light a fire the right way, the best way,
We're also going to demonstrate
some the advantages of a fire steel or some call it a flint and steel for lighting fires
as opposed to lighter, matches, or something like that
to start with the first thing when you're building a fire, the most important thing
is preparation, as you can see I've got lots of wood here and it's already
divided up into different piles, different sizes ready to go. A lot of people get a
small fire going and they'll run off in the woods to collect more firewood by the time they
come back its all out, so preparation would have prevented that so
we've got it all prepared
next thing every fire needs a base. Now often times this can just be the ground but as
you can see the ground here's a little bit snowy and wet
uh... base is something that keeps your fire
off the ground uh...
this is really important in deep snow you build your fire you know if you have a
small base it'll just sink into the snow so
they're more important of course when you have a real wet ground
something hard as big as possible to give you room to work
Next thing you need is a brace.
A brace is anything
ideally use it to block the wind as well but the main thing is you use it to to
lean your sticks against, keep them up off your tender and that will become more
important here in a minute
speaking of tinder and lighting a fire um... we've got this pot here to demonstrate,
If we were to take a lighter
try to light this fire right now, I can do this for half an hour and nothing's going to happen.
I'm not going to be able to get any fire.
if you throw it in your pocket for about forty five minutes it'll usually dry off
enough you can make it work, but
uh... if I'm really cold or someone just fell through ice somewhere, we've got to get the fire going now
the lighter's not going to cut it.
so next thing
is a flint and steel... or firesteel this one's the StrikeForce
made by Ultimate Survival Technologies
nice thing about it is
soaking wet
you can still get sparks out of it and make a fire
so that could be soaking for days it wouldn't matter
If you were to use
water proof matches, the matches themselves are water proof, often times the container they're
in has that rough surface to strike on, on the lid, that surfaces usually isn't
waterproof so you pull your waterproof matches out they're nice and dry or even
if they're wet, that's okay, they're waterproof
you go to strike them, they won't light, so
be aware of that.
so there's a lot of things we could use as tinder to start this fire
We could use
fluff from a cattail, really dry grass, something like that.
what I prefer
also because it can't really
it's not a problem if it gets wet is pitch wood
so we'll show you pitch wood here
Pitch wood is that dark wood
this is a piece of pine here, pitch wood is that dark strip there.
This other piece the whole piece is pitch wood
Pitch wood forms when a tree dies suddenly like it gets struck by lightning, something like that.
The force of the tree pulling sap upwards
quits immediately when the tree dies and all that force comes compacting down to the bottom
probably
foot, foot and a half of the stump
so the bottom of the stump will get what's called pitch wood and that's
the wood just completely saturated with sap and the reason it's waterproof is because
it's so saturated it could be in that water forever
there's no room for water to soak into the wood.
that's why I prefer pitch wood
I'll pull out a
Chris Reeve knife here
a must for every fire
and we're going to create our tinder
by scraping now, I'm not gonna shave off
any of this pitch wood, I'm going to scrape it off, so the knife is going to be perpendicular
going to push downwards
and you'll see I'm getting these nice funny
pieces, big chunks here
once you get a bunch of it you can sort of cut it off out of the way
and let's get a little more.
Keep that piece out of there, that would be cheating.
obviously if
if it's an emergency there's nothing wrong with cheating
but i want to show you how to do it right without doing that.
Okay, so that's our tinder so we've got our base, brace, and tinder.
the wind has shifted a little, so we'll block the wind
If I didn't have this brace, and started laying my kindling right on this, it would crush it down,
and tinder, all kinds of tinder works better with a little bit of fluff to it,
uh... so we don't want to crush, that's what that brace is going to do for us.
so before you put the any
kindling on the
fire you're gonna get yor tinder started.
and from there things will go a little quicker
and we'll start with the smaller kindling and work our way up.
We're just going to start placing this on here.
you want to give it a little bit of room between each one
so the fire
can get some oxygen get good air flow through there
then as you build your next layer, try to angle it a little
If I stack these all directly on top of each other
they'd fill up that whole area and we'd have no room for the oxygen
to get through
just keep going sort of crosswise back-and-forth
When you hear crackling that tells you it's starting to get going.
We've moved up to bigger stuff here, larger kindling about the size of your finger or thumb.
Remember to
constantly vary which direction it's going so that we have a lot of air flow through there.
It's important to keep adding the wood upwards. A lot of people say, "Okay I've got a fire going...
I'm going to stop".
Fire need something to grow to, and of course fire grows upwards so we'll build up
so the fire has somewhere to go.
Fires don't like to just sit, they want to grow.
Okay, so we'll give that just a second
next thing, we're going to be adding these bigger pieces.
at this point once you've got your fire going fairly well, you can decide what shape you want your fire.
You've probably heard of a teepee fire, a log cabin fire
You can light any fire starting this way and then from there
decide the shape of your fire. A log cabin fire is the best for a group of people to stand around it and be warm.
It keeps the heat low, and everyone around it can be warm.
A teepee fire focuses the heat upwards and it's better to cook over.
So start every fire this way and you can decide
what shape you want your fire to be from there.
Next we move on to the fuel. So that was kindling. Anything about this size or larger is fuel.
Once you have fuel on the fire, that's when the fire is sustainable. I could walk away from this fire for twenty minutes
looking for more fire wood, and it would still be going when I get back, so this is what really gets your fire sustainable for long periods of time.
So you can see we're building this into a teepee type of fire which will focus the fire more upwards that the other types of fire would do.
And if we want to make the fire bigger
we take all these pieces, lean them up against there, it makes the teepee even bigger.
Nice thing about a teepee fire is if I wanted to cook on it, I've got the fire
concentrated, going upwards in more or less one place. If I build a big log cabin fire, that heat's going everywhere, and getting my hand that close isn't really going to work.
So, we've showed you how to light a fire. Practice makes perfect, so any fire you're doing, if you're doing this in your wood stove or in a camp fire. do it this way. Then if you ever need it for an emergency, you'll have developed the skills to do it right every time.