FireJax

Primitive Fire Building

The Importance of fire

Fire is necessary to sustain life in the wilderness. It comforts you and gives you protection from the elements. It gives you a means by which to cook your food and sanitize your water. It provides light and smoke to build signal fires with. Fire craft is the most important survival skill that you could ever learn.

Mastering the Blaze

Starting a fire in the wilderness takes skill. You have to choose the proper materials and learn how to use those materials to start and maintain a fire. Practice these steps at home in your spare time so that you will know what to do if you ever get caught in a survival situation. Start in your back yard on sunny days until you have mastered the basics then move on to harder challenges like starting a fire in the wind, rain and snow. Remember that these are the situations that you are going to be faced with out there, so prepare for them now.

Proper Placement

You can’t start a fire until you know where to put the fire. The proper place is near your shelter, but not in it and not too close to it. You don’t want to burn the place down and kill yourself in the process. Be mindful of snow laden branches overhead and don’t build your fire under them. If you must, try to knock down as much of the snow as you can before building the fire. Otherwise you and your fire are going to end up cold and soaking wet.

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Fuel for the Fire

You need three types of wood to get a fire started: tinder, kindling and fuel. Tinder includes dried grasses, cattails and plant down. In other words, light fluffy material that will blaze at the touch of a spark. Bird’s nests make excellent tinder. They have everything you need to get a fire started including a nice bowl to stuff more tinder into. Collect as many of them as you can carry.  Now, get your tinder ready for lighting. If you don’t have a bird’s nest, shape what you have into the image of a bird’s nest. We are not going to get into lighting methods in this article, but however you do it get your spark or ember into the center of that tinder nest. Once it begins to smolder, gently blow it into flames.

Kindling is your starting fuel. It consists of small sticks and twigs no bigger than your thumb. This is what you are going to use to build your fire stack with. Start by building an ember bed. Use a rock to clear out a one foot by one foot square on the ground. Clear away any sod and debris from the square and scrape it down to bare earth. Next, lay small sticks of kindling down one way all the way across the square. This is your ember bed. Think of it as insulation for your fire. Now it’s time to build your fire stack. The teepee stack works best for this purpose. Stack your larger kindling around the ember bed like a teepee. This is more difficult than you might think, so be sure to practice it until you get it right. Start with three forked sticks about the size of a broom handle, maybe a little smaller. Weave the forks together so that the three sticks stand together on their own like a tripod. Now lean the rest of your kindling all the way around this structure. Leave an opening big enough to get your fist into. Once your tinder nest is burning, throw it right into the teepee door. You can stack more kindling around the teepee as it flames up. Eventually the whole stack will fall in on itself. By this time you will have a nice raging hot fire to start stacking your fuel on.

Fuel is what maintains the fire. Think about larger branches and fallen tree trunks. This is what is going to keep the fire going throughout the night. Make sure that the wood that you collect is dry. Fuel can be stacked on the fire anyway you like, but I highly suggest staying with a teepee type structure. One last word of wisdom, don’t build bon fires during survival situations. If you can’t get close enough to the fire to cook and stay warm, then you are using too much fuel. This is a waste of resources.