In an emergency, knowing how to light a fire can be the difference between life and death. Fire covers a whole range of human needs: it gives you warmth and comfort, you can cook and preserve food over it, and you can use it to purify water, sterilise bandages, send a distress signal and keep wild animals at bay. It can also light a torch to show you the way through rough terrain.
Would you like to know how to make a torch with your own hands in a quarter of an hour, using nothing but a knife? Have a look at my article on how to make a torch in 15 minutes.
An ordinary campfire has also had a knack for lifting people’s spirits, probably ever since humans have been around. That is exactly why it is so important to know how to light a campfire in almost any conditions.
Preparation
Fire is not all upside, though, and it can cause trouble too. Wherever there is fire, there is a risk of a wildfire, so before you light one, get a clear picture of a few key safety questions:
- Are you allowed to light a fire here at all? In Polish forests, for example, campfires are only permitted in designated fire spots.
- Make sure the place where you are lighting the fire is properly ventilated, otherwise you risk carbon monoxide poisoning. This matters most of all when you light a fire in any kind of cave or in a small, enclosed space.
- Take a look around, too. Is there any dry grass or dead leaves nearby that could catch and let the fire get out of hand?
- It is always a good idea to make sure that, if things go wrong, you can put a fire out quickly. Get to know the area: find a nearby stream you could draw water from to douse the flames. Better still, fill a container with water in advance and keep it somewhere in camp.
Ideal for camping, hiking, trekking, travelling, the beach or the garden, or as a festival tent.
A bit of theory: fire and how it starts
Lighting a fire is a skill like any other, and like any other job, doing it well takes proper preparation. So before we get a campfire going, let’s run through a few basic facts about fire.
Humanity has made most of its progress by asking so-called “stupid questions”, questions so stupid that nobody knows the answer. We are going to ask one of those “stupid questions” too, although luckily this one was answered a long time ago:
Why does anything burn at all?
Or, more precisely: what does it take to start combustion and keep a fire going?
The answer is the so-called fire triangle. It names the three ingredients without which there is no fire:
- oxygen
- heat
- fuel
Take away any one of them and the fire is gone.
Oxygen: surely everyone knows the old scouting trick of blowing on a fire a few times when it starts to die down. That way you feed it more oxygen, so the combustion reaction runs more vigorously. Burning is nothing more than the oxidation reaction you may remember from science lessons, so the name of the process alone tells you that without oxygen you get nowhere.
Heat: heat is needed to turn a solid (in our case, usually wood) into gas. Not everyone realises this, but wood does not actually burn directly. Heat makes it release gases, and it is those gases that burn, giving off heat and flame.
Fuel: as I said, our fuel will usually be wood. Depending on the conditions and what is available, you can burn all sorts of things. Bedouins, for example, use dried camel dung. I suspect most of us would rather stick with wood, though.
Remember: never put wet stones from a river, stream or lake into a fire. As they heat up, the water trapped inside them starts to boil, the pressure inside rises sharply and they can explode. Seriously.
Right, I think that’s enough theory. Let’s get the campfire ready.
Good preparation is half the battle
Any job worth doing needs proper preparation. So how do you light a campfire properly, so that the whole thing actually makes sense?
The first thing you will need is the right kind of fuel, and plenty of it.
Next comes the weather. Is the spot where you plan to light the fire properly sheltered from the wind? If the weather is fairly calm, you have nothing to worry about. A light breeze can even help keep the fire going by feeding it extra oxygen. But if you are trying to light a fire in a gusty wind, you need to find good shelter. Almost anything will do: a large boulder, a rock overhang, even a broad tree trunk. Use your imagination.
A well-built windbreak can also work as an excellent heat reflector. Thanks to it, some of the heat radiated by the fire bounces off the shelter and comes back to you.
If you cannot find any shelter like that and the wind is particularly gusty, as a last resort you can dig a small pit in the ground and light your fire in it.
Let me remind you once again about the risk of starting a wildfire, which you should never take lightly. I once saw with my own eyes how a tiny flame set a whole good-sized hillside of dry grass alight, literally within moments. At first it looked harmless: just a small flame and a bit of smoke. But within a minute or so the fire had spread so fast that there was no putting it out.
Think about the trouble you could get into and the damage you could do if you started a fire like that in the middle of a forest. Better to think about it beforehand.
Tinder: whoever can’t find it… er… won’t be lighting a fire
Tinder is what gets the fire started: it is the stuff you hold the match to or strike the spark onto.
Good tinder is the key to lighting a campfire quickly and reliably. Any dry, fine material that readily takes a spark from a fire steel or the flame of a match will do. That might be small, dry broken twigs, dried blades of grass, dried moss, or even a bit of cotton sock fluffed up with a knife. I encourage you to experiment with different kinds of tinder. After a while you will get the hang of it and be able to tell at a glance whether tinder is any good.
Out in the wild, conifer resin makes good tinder. It works much like the paraffin wax in a candle. Just look for a damaged tree that is oozing resin and break off, or cut off with a knife, a few dry pieces. Then crumble it between your fingers and sprinkle the crumbs over your tinder. You can also use bigger lumps to get an already burning fire going faster.
Some of the best tinder around is dry conifer twigs, ideally pine. They come naturally soaked in flammable resin, so they catch quickly.
Gather plenty of wood
Once you have decent tinder, look around for bigger branches to keep the fire going. The best ones for the job are dry, dead branches that are still attached to trees. The ones lying on the ground are often wet and rotten and make poor fuel. For one thing, they struggle to catch, and for another, once they do burn they smoke terribly. Sometimes smoke is exactly what you want, for instance when smoking meat or driving off pesky insects. For that, though, you are better off using fresh green leaves than rotten branches.
The best test of whether a branch is dry is to try to snap it. If it breaks with a dry crack, it is good for your fire. If it bends and you struggle to break it, it is not good fuel.
Let’s light it!
When lighting a fire, follow one important rule: start with the tinder, then move on to small, thin sticks and twigs, and gradually add thicker and bigger pieces. Obviously you will not light a thick log directly with a single match. But if you first light the small sticks and then gradually add thicker and bigger ones, in the end you will be able to throw on even very thick logs, and they will catch without any trouble.
Do not light the fire until you have gathered enough fuel.
Small twigs, brushwood and dry grass burn very quickly with a bright, lively flame, while thick logs and stumps burn slowly and last longer. With that in mind, ask yourself whether you have enough fuel to keep the fire going. And what does “enough” mean here? According to Bear Grylls, the first step to gathering “enough” is to collect wood until you are sure you have plenty. The next step is to collect three times as much again.
In other words: you need to gather far more wood than you think you need.
How to build a campfire
There are several ways to lay a campfire, and each has its pros and cons. Your surroundings and the situation you are in decide which type of fire suits you best.
The tipi fire
To build a tipi-style fire, arrange the tinder and a few small sticks in the shape of a Native American tipi (sometimes wrongly called a wigwam). The finer fuel goes inside, and the further out you go, the thicker the branches. As the tipi burns, the outer sticks fall inwards and feed the fire. This type of fire burns well even with damp wood.
The lean-to fire
To build a lean-to fire, drive a green (and so barely flammable) stick into the ground at an angle of about 30 degrees, with its tip pointing into the wind. Put the tinder deep under the stick, near where it goes into the ground. Lay two rows of dry branches so that they rest on the stick. Now you can light the tinder. As the fire burns, keep adding more branches, leaning them against the stick.
The star fire
To use this method, scratch a cross about 30 cm across into the ground. Then dig out the soil along the lines of the cross to a depth of 7 to 8 cm. Put a good amount of tinder in the middle of the cross. Build a pyramid of dry branches over the tinder, just as in the tipi method. The shallow trench you dug lets air move under the fire, which keeps a steady supply of oxygen coming.
The pyramid fire
To build a pyramid fire, lay two small logs or branches on the ground, parallel to each other. Then lay a thick layer of smaller branches across them. Add three or four more layers, each one finer than the layer directly beneath it and laid at right angles to it. In this version the tinder goes on top of the pyramid. As the fire burns, the layers underneath catch from the burning wood above them. Because the fire burns from the top down, you do not have to tend it during the night.
What to light a fire with
The simplest way to light a fire is to hold a match to the bottom of the fire you have built, where you put the tinder. If you did everything right up to this point, the flames will gradually spread through the whole structure. Now all you have to do is keep it from going out.
It can happen, though, that your matches get wet. You can try drying them by keeping them in a dry pocket close to your body heat, or by rubbing them in your hair. A much better idea, however, is to protect your matches before you head out. To make waterproof matches, melt some candle wax and dip the matches in it one by one. Once the wax sets, the matches will be covered in a waterproof coat of wax.
Another option is a fire steel. Its big advantage is that damp does not bother it, so you do not have to worry about it getting wet. It takes up very little space, and you can even wear it round your neck. One fire steel is enough to light hundreds, if not thousands, of fires.
Other ways to start a fire
If you have neither matches nor a fire steel, you can try other methods of starting a fire.
You can use a magnifying glass, or even the bottom of a bottle. Anything transparent with a curved surface will do.
Another way is to use a battery and a piece of foil, for example from a chewing gum wrapper.
As a last resort you can also use the battery from your phone. Just remember that the fumes it gives off are toxic and harmful. It is also easy to burn yourself, because the reaction is pretty violent.
There are also more primitive methods, which mostly come down to rubbing two pieces of wood together. They are fairly hard to master and take a lot of practice. If you have never done it before, you probably won’t manage it first time.
Get outside and light some fires! (but only where it’s allowed)
None of the methods I have described here will be any use to you in a real situation unless you try them out in practice. Practice makes perfect, so you should test what you have read here out in the field. That does not mean you have to charter a helicopter to the Siberian taiga straight away. You can practise in your own back garden. The point is to build up practice and confidence. Theory on its own may not be enough.
This is, of course, not a complete guide to lighting fires. I deliberately left out a few fundamental points, because I tried to keep things fairly simple and easy to take in. But maybe you would like to know more, or have something to add? If so, tell me about it in the comments.
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