Fire building

How to Build an Awesome Fire

I have seen many people fumble with commercial fire starters and accelerants i.e. gasoline and still fail to start a fire so here are the basics to make you look like a pro and stay alive. Fire building is one of the most essential skills for any person who spends time in the outdoors. The rule of threes says that the average person can live only 3 minutes without oxygen before they die of hypoxia, three hours without shelter and warmth before hypothermia causes death, three days before someone can die of dehydration without water. Three hours is not very long, so let’s develop some skills to keep you alive.


Some words of wisdom before I talk about the skills you need to survive. Most people have over confidence in their ability to start a fire so known your limits. Always gather twice as much fuel and tender as you thought you needed, you can never have too much. Fire occurs when fuel is heated in the presence of oxygen, this is important to remember because all of fire building problems come from those three elements.

Safety is simple when it comes to fire. Don’t touch it if it’s hot, use common sense, and clear the ground where the fire will be made to, “… prevent forest fires” says Smokey the Bear. Lastly use caution when using accelerants, sometimes they will be necessary during emergencies but use sparingly. Remember when using accelerants that the vapors are what ignite not the fuel so the fuel may flash when touched with flame.

In with fire safety is burn treatment. If you are burnt forget all the home remedies, they don’t work and are usually dangerous. Identify the burn as first degree, second degree, or third degree and treat accordingly. First degree can be identified by redness just like sun burn and should be treated by rinsing with plenty of cool not cold, clean water. Second degree burns can be identified by more redness and blisters to the surface of the skin. Second degree burns as long as they are not covering large areas of skin or sensitive areas like the face or hands can be treated the same as first degree burns and then covered in wet clean dressings. Third degree burns are identified by burnt away skin and charring. Third degree is the most sever burn and will cause permanent damage. These burns should be covered in a sterile dressing that is dry. Always seek medical attention for serious burns.

BUILDING THE FIRE is in all caps for those not interested in the preface and safety. The first mistake most people make during fire building is collecting the wrong type of tender. Tender is very critical because the more flammable the tender the less heat is required for ignition. There are a ton of different things that can be used for tender when building a fire but the most effective is to find the smallest dead twigs on live trees. I mean the smallest; these twigs should be hair thin and should make a loud pop when broken. Prune these from the branches of the trees in the area until you have amassed a huge pile of them. The reason these twigs are so good as fire starters is because the tree shunts all the water from the dead twig for preservation making it super dry, also because they are off the damp ground even during the cold wet winters these twigs are bone dry. Lots of people want to continue to make fire building more complicated than this but after you have collected a bunch of tender just find stuff incrementally bigger and stack it in piles until you have a good pile of fuel that is as big in diameter as you want to burn.

For a reasonably sized fire clear an area five feet in diameter of leafs and brush. Grab one of your large logs for fuel and lay it in the middle of the fire pit. I don’t cut wood for fires because it is a waste of my time. The fire will cut your wood for you and you can just feed the ends of a long log back into the fire as it burns in half. Then take all of the little tender and place it against the big log in preparation of ignition.

There are dozens of ways to ignite a fire from a blow torch to a convex lens on a sunny day so use an effective means. The hotter the method of ignition the less dry the fuel and tender need to be. You can get a fairly green stick to burn through in a blazing fire but without dry moss or charred cotton you will have a hell of a time starting a fire with flint alone. Focus on constantly starting a fire with one match and only one then move on to other methods.

Once the tender is ignited you have to move fast (this is where having the fuel sorted by size and in piles helps a ton). The shape you give your fire will give it certain characteristics and the three methods I use cover most bases. The teepee is a pretty classic method and is one of my favorite because it uses fuel efficiently and keeps a small warm fire. I think a small fire that burns hot like this one is most desirable when you don’t have time to collect a ton of wood or if there isn’t much dry wood available. A log cabin arrangement of the fire wood works better for large groups and is better for creating a large bed of coals for many people to cook from. A lean to is the last method and this is where you place one large log on the ground as described above and lean all of your fire wood against it. Add fuel and blow on the fire at a rate that increases the flame. You don’t want to blow so hard that you blow your fire out like candles on your birthday but you want to give the extra oxygen to help your tender burn and keep in mind that fuel must be spaced out and have plenty of air flow between in to be effective. Once your tender is ignited and you have blown this little pile of inner bark, twigs, or moss into a large flame quickly add small quantities of sticks to the fire first using all of the smallest diameter ones then moving to the largest. If you get to this sentence and you don’t have a blazing fire you messed something up move on to the next paragraph for trouble shooting.

Troubleshooting your fire is frustrating because 90% of people who failed at starting a fire were probably confident they wouldn’t have a problem (myself included). Did you get your tender to ignite? If you can’t get your tender to ignite with a match you are not collecting tender re-read tend collecting and try again because this stuff really does work every time. If your tender ignited and then went out go back out and collect twice as much tender as before which is why you should get twice as much as you think you need. Fire is heating fuel in the presence of oxygen so one of those three elements is responsible for your failure to start a fire.

Heat; the ignition method you used was not hot enough to light the fuel so if you can’t provide more heat then you must find a less dense fuel, smaller in diameter and more air flow. Wet fuel will waste the heat from your ignition source because the ignition source will be evaporating the water prior to igniting the wood. So get smaller dryer wood

Oxygen/Fuel; there is a fine balance with oxygen when building a fire so blow on the fire starting out very gentle and increasing with the fire, too much will blow the fire out and too little and it will go out on its own. If you smoother a fire with a pile of tightly packed sticks or add a large log too fast you decrease the surface area of the wood which means there is less oxygen touching the fuel. If you space out small diameter branches with plenty of room for air flow you will correct this issue and you can always use a stick to knock branches out of the fire or move them to make better air flow.

Best of luck in your fire building. If you have any interesting tips or questions share them.