Gordon - Wilderness Survival Skills - Fire Building Techniques: For Camping, Bushcraft, and Preppers

Wilderness Survival Skills

Bushcraft and Prepper Fire Building Techniques to keep you Warm and Fed in an Emergency, Camping, or at Home

Ben Gordon

Copyright 2019 by Ben Gordon - All rights reserved.

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Introduction

I want to thank you for downloading the book, Wilderness Survival Skills: Bushcraft and Prepper Fire Building Techniques to keep you Warm and Fed in an Emergency, Camping, or at Home.

This book contains proven strategies on how to start a fire from the materials around you, even in forests that are soaked from weeks of rain.

Youll learn about the three things any fire needs, and how to provide them as efficiently as possible.

Then youll delve into what makes a good fuel, and how to find it in the forest, as well as a few fire lays and how to pick which one will work the best for the fuel and wind.

Finally, well cover starting the fire, first with modern methods, and later by banging rocks and rubbing sticks.

Each fire lay, type of tinder, and fire-starting method is explained, in detail, with pointers on how to be the most efficient with your actions, and tips on how to ensure success.

Thanks again for downloading this book, I hope you enjoy it!

The Fire Stool

Fire requires three things to burn, this is often referred to as the fire triangle, but makes more sense in my mechanical brain as a three-legged fire stool. Pull any of the three legs, and the results will be less than incendiary. The first leg, which is most often overlooked, is oxygen. Fire is the chemical reaction of oxygen with fuel, using up the oxygen in the process. Providing oxygen is easy enough, as it makes up about 21% of the atmosphere, but the fire will quickly burn through the supply if not allowed a constant inflow of fresh air. When laying out a fire, it is important to plan how oxygen will get to what must be burned in the initial stages of the fire. A densely packed pile of perfectly dry twigs will not burn well, whereas spreading them a bit and stacking them so as to allow air flow will have much better results.

The next leg is fuel, or something to burn. This can be paper, wood, plastic, or even metals if the fire gets hot enough. The most important qualities of the fuel are dryness and size. Wood, leaves, and litter that are soaked with water are very difficult to light, as a tremendous amount of energy that could ordinarily be used to ignite the fuel must be wasted boiling the water and forcing out the steam before the fuel can take light. Smaller pieces of fuel can be lit more easily, so starting with things that are light and fluffy, like dry pine needles and leaves, can give a larger flame to light twigs, branches, and finally logs. Dry is emphasized because barring extremely arid climates, leaf litter on the forest floor is nearly always wet, or at least damp enough to make it steam instead of catch fire.

The final leg is heat energy, usually from an existing flame or spark. Wood or other fuels are a lot like a battery with a bouncer. For years, sunlight hits trees, and most of the energy is used to maintain the life of the tree, while a little is stored away in the form of wood growth. Once the tree is cut down, that heat and light is still accessible, but theres an access fee. The cover charge for this show is that some amount of energy must be provided to the fuel upfront to get the party going. Once this energy has been invested, enough that the fuel continues to burn without external input, the excess heat can be used to dry and light other pieces of fuel. Larger pieces need more energy upfront, while smaller pieces like twigs and grasses hardly need any coaxing to start up. Start with very small pieces of fuel and a match or lighter for an easy start and transition up the fire food-chain to twigs, small sticks, and progressively larger pieces up to logs and larger as necessary.

Finding Fuel

As fire is a reaction of oxygen to release energy in the form of heat and light, the list of potential fuels is almost endless. However, just because something can be burned does not mean it is wise to do so. Plastics (among other things) often emit noxious fumes when burned. The best fuel for a campfire consists of dry, seasoned wood, with perhaps some twigs and paper to get it started. Wood was described by Aldo Leopold as a sort of natural battery: the tree stores away little bits of the energy it takes in from the sun over its lifetime, and burning it releases the heat and light again. It turns out that, given an excess of nutrients and water, trees of most species store away about the same weight of wood each year. This explains why the wood of fast-growing trees like poplar or birch tends to be much lighter, or less dense, than wood of a slower grower, like a red oak.

Recently alive wood, or green wood , has a very high moisture content. Combustion of a piece of wood requires that the majority of the water stored within that piece first be boiled off before it will sustain a flame on its own, so reducing the moisture content before trying to light firewood is essential. This is not to say that its not possible to burn green wood, just that its much more difficult to do so. Denser woods take longer to dry out than lighter woods, as there is less air space for the water to migrate out through the pores of the wood. The moisture can either be allowed to migrate out on its own, or the wood can be dried in a large kiln. Either way, exposing more surface area to the air will help the wood to come to equilibrium with the moisture content of the surrounding air. Splitting firewood is the normal means of increasing surface area, and stacking it well to allow air to circulate through the stack speeds drying. Even split and stacked, air-drying dense oaks can take more than a year in northern climates. Not every fire can be planned years in advance, which brings about the importance of finding wood already dry enough to burn.

The forest floor is wet. Even when it seems dry, the dense mat of litter that accumulates in most forests is a teeming mass of decay, churned by earthworms, and it holds moisture very well. Anything in contact with it will be much wetter than a few feet off the ground. Looking up is the best way to find dry wood when it is needed for a fire in the near-term. Often branches break off of trees and fall, only to get hung up on lower branches and never make it to the ground. Another option is dead branches still attached to the tree. Dense stands of pines and other trees will block out much of the light from the forest floor, rendering the lower branches worthless. In white pines and spruces especially, the lower branches die off, but continue to hang on the tree, dry and ready to serve as kindling. When larger fuel is needed, look for whole dead trees still standing with bark intact. Even if the upper portions are rotted, the lower are probably still solid enough to be used as some of the major logs for a fire, at least for long enough to dry out some greener logs.