Vicky Campfires and setting up camp
Building a good fire for your camping trip isn’t just a fancy party trick to impress your fellow campers. Most camping gear today makes traditional campfire building look paltry and tedious. Knowing how to
build a proper campfire can mean the difference between life and death in extreme weather circumstances.
Because in the olden days, everyone knew how to build a campfire. It meant the difference between keeping warm and freezing. When they used to make a campfire, it also meant the difference between eating or starving. These days, night temperatures can be very cold, temperatures drop fast at night and you need to keep warm. Campfires provide a means for everyone to gather around and warm up. A place to sit around and have a few drinks with your fellow campers.
Other Reasons Why We Make A Campfire
In camping areas of countries like the USA, Canada and Australia, where there are wild dogs, bears and other wild animals, campfires are always left burning well into the night. This repels them and keeps them safe. These days it is a lot easier to make a campfire as we have lighters and matches.
How To Make A Campfire
First of all, the secret to starting campfires is to start them quickly. You can only do this if you have a firm grasp of what is needed to start a fire – heat, oxygen, and fuel. Oxygen, while around us, is not always readily available to the campfire, you may have to arrange the fuel in such a way that it has an adequate air supply. You may also supplement this supply by blowing into a cinder or fanning an already-growing flame.
Heat is usually generated for campfires by friction. You will probably use an assortment of methods to generate this heat. Rubbing two sticks together, using flint stones, and other techniques will start a fire.
However, this won’t give you a glorious fan of flames if you don’t have the right fuel to keep the fire going. Fuel is what keeps your fire burning, and finding the right type of fuel is integral to your efforts at building and keeping a fire alive.
Trying to make a campfire just by adding heat to the logs isn’t going to work. You will need tinder. Tinder is an easily combustible material that will burn quickly and hopefully give enough heat and gases to start a fire with larger pieces of wood. You can find tinder around you, you need dry sticks, bark, dry leaves and twigs. But you do need to remember that the fire will need the larger pieces of wood to actually burn and stay burning.
Different Ways To Make A Campfire
There are a few different ways to make a campfire, and they all have different reasons for making them. Here are a few that will help you make a campfire to enjoy.
A Teepee Fire
Tepees are great for quick fires and last long into the night. It makes use of a lot of tinder, so you will need to gather a fair bit of it. The longer burning wood is placed, balanced against each other
vertically around the tinder. This makes sure that the heat and the gases of the tinder are generated in a way to help the larger pieces of wood to burn. It is the perfect fire for boiling water and general-purpose campfires.
A Pyramid Fire
For a pyramid fire, you build a pyramid of logs by laying the logs horizontally on the ground together, then building another layer on top of the next gradually forming a pyramid. Although this type of
campfire is a little hard to start up, the advantage of such is that it generates a lot of charcoal that will be useful in the future. It burns pretty well and is quite a stable fire.
A Parallel Fire
The parallel fire puts the tinder in between two logs. This is an efficient burning fire since the insides of the log burn too. Having the fire burning in a good, snug place between two logs. This also keeps the heat in the middle.
The Star Or Indian Fire
This is the type of fire you usually see in those old Western movies. The logs are laid out like the spokes of a wheel. Tinder is placed in the middle. The fire is easy to maintain, although you do have to push each spoke of the wheel towards the middle as the fuel burns up.
There are other types of campfires, all with specific purposes. But as with any outdoor skill, creating and maintaining any of them takes a lot of practice to get right. And like mothers usually tell their kids, don’t play with fire. Treat it with respect as it has the power to save and destroy. You should always remember to follow safety precautions after using a fire. Make sure that you douse the fire with water or bury the remains of a campfire with dust and dirt. Unfortunately, fires left unattended may cause serious property damage, so always take precautions so that nothing that shouldn’t burn gets burned.
