Episode: 1296
Title: HPR1296: Intro to camp fires
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1296/hpr1296.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:08:43

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In that case.
Hello and welcome to another hacker public radio. I'm Pokey and I'll be your host again
today. I'd like to propose a new recurring series today with my topic. That would be how
I got over my social awkwardness, which is not to claim that I'm completely over my social
awkwardness, but you know little steps here and there every little bit helps. I'm sitting here
in my backyard. It's a Sunday morning. It's a lovely day. Plenty of ambient noise going on and
I'm having a little brush fire and a little campfire setup we have in our backyard and it occurred
to me that lots of folks don't know how to make a campfire and it's a good skill to have because
it can help you get over your social awkwardness. Sure the campfire tender at somebody's party
and you do a good job with that. It's very likely you're going to get invited back. Also learn
into grill hamburgers is a good one. You're probably going to get invited back to the next party,
but you you may just want to go camping and it's nice to be able to light a campfire and it's not
as easy as it looks. Sometimes you get lucky you get some real dry wood and they light up real quick,
but yeah it's not always as easy as it looks. The biggest most important thing about your campfire
obviously is going to be safety. So you want to make sure that you have a good
you know what we call a fire ring or a fire pit to have your campfire and if you want to
like campground where there's a fire ring just do it right there right where they put it don't move
the ring they prep that spot that's that's what you want. If you were in your own yard or something
you're going to want to be careful with what you're doing. If you're on the woods especially
you're going to want to be careful with what you're doing because fire can travel down and it
can smolder in tree roots and such. So it's a really good idea if you're going to have a fire to
dig a hole at least six inches down and at least you know maybe a foot and diameter larger
than you plan to have your ring and then fill it in with non combustible material like sand or clay
if you can find some of that and then make your ring of stones and it's a good idea to have a
ring around your fire because those stones will collect the fire's heat and reflect it back
in towards the fire and help you burn. It would be much more efficient that way and it's going to
work a lot better for you. One of the other things I like to do especially if I had some running
water as I like to fill a five gallon bucket of water before I start and there's a couple reasons
for that. The main reason is nothing quenches a fire like smothering it in a big bucket of water.
I mean you can run a garden hose over your fire and it just evaporates the water as you spray it on
there but quenching it like that with a bucket of water that'll douse it real quick and you know
it's out. I learned to make fire as a Cub Scout leader with my son doing Cub Scouts and the Cub
Scout motto for that is fire is not out until it's cold out until it's putting off no heat there's
cold there so I like to completely quench it. So getting a fire started you have several sizes of
starting material you want to start with your tinder paper works good for that you can you can
twist up newspaper that's fantastic you can find things in the wild like dry pine needles
that works good you can do cat tail fluff that's that burns pretty quickly you need to have something
on top of that that's going to catch just as quickly but but cat tail fluff is great for catching
sparks if you're lighting your fire with a spark instead of a match or a lighter but if you have
a match or a lighter go ahead and use that it's going to be much easier for you if you want the
challenge of lighting it with a spark go for it another couple things if you're you know going
out camping and you want to prep some fire stuff ahead of time that's easy to do you can get some
paraffin wax at a grocery store or a hardware store though I find it's really expensive at the
hardware stores but three times as much for the exact same product and same quantity but if you
melt down some paraffin wax in a double bath don't ever melt paraffin over direct heat because
it's highly combustible once it's liquid but do like a double bath like you would for chocolate if
you don't know the double bath is go ahead and google it and you can dip some cotton balls in there
and that paraffin wax don't make it so hot that you can't touch it if you get it on your fingers
it won't burn yeah that's that's about as warm as you need to get it uh you get some cotton balls
in there and it kind of seals them up make some pretty waterproof but when you get out to your
campsite you can break them open it doesn't saturate into the middle so you have that cotton fluff
in the middle that catches fire very very quickly and very readily even with a spark and then the
the wax begins to melt almost immediately because it's a thin layer and it burns for you know a good
three minutes maybe two or three minutes and puts off some real good heat so you can get your
kindling going so above your tinder you're going to want to put your kindling and that's like
little sticks and twigs uh the smaller the better up to about the diameter of your pinky finger is
good for kindling wood and then above that you kind of want to work your way out sticks that are
the size your thumb you know all the way up to maybe the size your wrist and anything bigger than
that you're going to want split wood and split wood burns much better anyway and it's also it's
pretty important to get dry wood uh unless you have a wood that burns well when it's wet and by dry
I don't mean that it hasn't been rained on what any of my dry wood is that it's set out in the air
for months on end so that the water in the heart of the wood in the center of the wood has a time
to evaporate uh seasoned wood it's also called or gray wood because it usually hardwoods will take on
a gray color if they set out like that and weathered or as wet wood or green wood as it's called
has so much moisture content that even if you get it to burn it's just going to smoke a lot
a smokey fire is not fun for anybody unless you're doing smoke signals I guess I don't know or trying
to smoke food over but that's a whole different kind of fire I'm not not worried about that
splitting wood is not as hard as it looks if you've got logs you know when you're splitting them
with a mall that's that's a whole other story you probably already know what you're doing there
but you can take smaller wood you know about the size of the of your wrist to maybe twice that size
and you can split that with a technique that I like that's called batoning where you're not
actually swinging the axe or your camp knife if you've got a really large high quality knife you
can do with a knife also but you basically just set the wood on end on something hard and you put
the the axe or the knife on top of it and you you whack the back of the axe or the knife with
like a wooden stick you know just find a sturdy stick no work it like a mallet and you you whack
that and it splits the wood for you and it's very efficient that takes almost no effort at all
and you're gonna have a nice a nice piece of wood to burn around your campfire there
the another thing though I mean if you're going camping for the weekend very often around campsites
you'll see people selling campfire wood if it's already split and dry go ahead that's so much less
effort you know even if it costs you know nowadays probably 10 or 15 bucks for a bundle a
bundle is about all you're gonna need for one night of camping just keep in mind if you're camping
outdoors you want campfire wood not cordwood the difference being that campfire wood is usually
pine or cedar or something like that it's it's not something you want to burn indoors in a fireplace
because it leaves a lot of creusote in the chimney and is a safety hazard to burn in the chimney
but it's fine for burning outdoors it's considered a lower quality of wood so it's a lot less expensive
now you can burn cordwood in your campfire there's nothing stop on you from burning cordwood it's just
a hell of a lot more expensive once you get your tinders lit and you get your kindling going and it's
time to start burning some wood putting some logs on that fire this is where most people most
people who can get past the gindling stages where most people kill it they wind up smothering the
fire because they do too much too soon or they do it incorrectly you don't want to smother the
fire the key to having a fire that sustains itself is that logs don't burn themselves they burn
each other so as they burn they put off ultraviolet heat radiant heat which is where most of the heat
comes off comes off as ultraviolet light so if you can take your your flattest pieces of wood
that are going to put off and reflect off the most amount of ultraviolet light and aim those flat
pieces of wood at each other so keeping the logs parallel you're gonna have the best possible
burn the best fire going just by keeping your logs parallel i see people kind of just throwing
logs on there and you know all willy nilly and if your fire is big enough and burning well
enough you can do that and it doesn't matter and most times when you're talking about a bon fire
it's a big dam fire you know i got a buddy who throws a couple of parties every year and his
fire pits so big he just throws pallets on there without even busting him up i mean it's it's a
great big fire pit and pallets burn fantastically well because they're nothing but flat wood and
they're already pointing at one another they got a nice big channel to vent air up through
so they burn real well one of the easiest types of fires to get going is what they call log cabin
fire you know often when you think about building a camp fire you you think of the like the TP
shaped fire and i have never had any luck with those whatsoever they always seem to put themselves
out they smother themselves or they fall over and and they just don't do anything for me but i've always
had wonderful luck with a log cabin fire to do one of those you basically build a stack of wood
that is uh like a jenga stack with the the center is knocked out you put a couple of big logs
parallel at the bottom and then you stack your tinder and your kindling in between those logs
of keeping all your sticks parallel and then you start putting more logs you take two more and
you put them across those on top of them and then you put some more tinder up in between those and
then you put another set of logs up on there you can go depending on the size of your fire and you
go three or four high safely you get too high and i mean the things it just becomes a roaring fire
very very quickly and you get like a chimney a fire shooting up the middle and not only the
flame shoot very very high but it also collapses very quickly and you can roll right out of your ring
if you build it too high like that but that's an easy fire to get going it's very fun it's very
impressive for people to see how quickly a fire like that can just become 15 foot tall shooting
orange flames it's it's really fun another thing to do we want to keep in mind is as your
as your logs burn you want to turn them every once in a while so it's good to have a long
stick that you're going to use as your stirring stick and i out that's the other reason i like to
have a bucket of water is to dip that stick in it when i'm done so i'm not taking a firey stick out
and and putting it somewhere where i'm not sure somebody's going to step on it with you know
you shouldn't have bare feet around a fire but you can't control everybody lots of people do
and that's another one anytime i have a camp fire especially if there's kids around that's one of
the rules of our house is that if you're going to get up and walk around you have to walk behind
the people you're not allowed to walk between a person and the fire pit because that's how people
trip and fall in and get you know burned in the coals or whatever and that's that's no good
as your fire burns down your logs burn down they'll they'll become cold so become charcoals
and you want to keep trying to roll your fresh logs kind of on top of the charcoal you get the
coals at the very base they're putting off the most heat of of anything in the fire but they're
burning much slower so they'll help to preheat all your wooden sustain that fire just keep
everything going on top of those coals and the coals is also because it's it's a steady consistent
heat that's what you want to cook over if you want to do any cooking even something as simply as
marshmallows on a stick and i am like a world champion marshmallow toaster like people laugh at me
when i say that until we roast marshmallows together and they're just i make i do really good
marshmallows and i usually wind up having to toast a few for everybody because they just
they don't have the patience to do it i really likes to hold it over the fire and try and brown it
up quick and a lot of times to catch on fire but i i never let a marshmallow or a hot dog or
anything i'm cooking over a camper i never let it get over the flames i always think of the the
red light coming off that fire the ultraviolet light coming off that fire as the actual work doing
the cooking as the energy that's doing cooking because it is and i think of it like a flashlight
shining on the the marshmallow the hot dog or whatever i try to get the most light evenly
all the way across it and then i try to rotate it slowly and steadily just to keep the whole thing
heating evenly the whole time and you get really really nice campfire hot dogs that way and and
toasted marshmallows and you know if you you show somebody how to do that they appreciate it
even if they don't have the patience to do it you know they do appreciate that you show them
you can put like a fork to stick in the ground and balance it on that and that gets it even more
consistent because you're not moving it around as much or just lay it across a rock i like to go to
we have a store up here in the northeast of the u.s. they call the christmas tree shop
and for some reason the only place i've seen them but in the summertime they sell these bamboo
skewer sticks or marshmallow sticks or whatever and they're about two and a half feet long and
just a pointy dowel really but you get like 20 or 30 of them for a dollar it's so much easier than
going up in the woods to find a whole bunch of straight long you know young sticks i don't know
we just we do that every summer we buy a few bundles of them and we don't worry about them
throw them in the fire when we're done with them and and no problem but if you do have to find a
stick out in the woods to toast a hot dog on or or toast a marshmallow on i like to use maple for
that you look at the leaves of the tree it should look like the the leaf on the canadian flag that's
how you identify maple it's a nice wood it doesn't have any funny taste to it it doesn't it's not
poisonous in any way that i'm aware of maybe there's some species of maple somewhere that is you
probably want to look into that but as far as i know in my area then i don't think any of them are
you know you just get a long straight one every time i'm out camping or hiking or whatever
i carry like a folding saw and a pair of clippers with me and you know they don't weigh nothing but
they're good to have and you can just clip off that little branch or whatever trim the end of it
down with your knife so you can get your your hot dog on there your marshmallow on there and kind
of toast the end of the stick on the fire to dry it out a bit and you're ready to go it's that easy
people appreciate when you're the guy paying attention to the fire because everybody likes to
sit around and do their own thing you know some people like to just talk some people like to just
kind of stare into the fire and get lost and i i love doing all those things and part of it is
just maintaining the fire and you know to me there's there's kind of like an arc form to it to
keep it going to know when to feed it and when to turn it and you know when it might need some air
and i i don't have a problem getting down on my hands and knees and blowing on the base of the
fire to kind of stoke it a little you just remember to pull your face back before you inhale again
you gotta get your face out of the heat and out of the smoke you don't want to get a good long
full of that but you can you know blow on the base of the fire and get it stoked up if it seems to
be dying down or smoking out or if you smothered it a little you need to get air into it that's
usually what's going on there that's about it fires are just a lot of fun there there's not too much
to it but it's not immediately obvious and and the biggest trick is just keeping your logs parallel
that was something that somebody showed me one night while i was you know struggling to keep a
fire going for everybody that's what he said and it really worked out well and i spent the rest
the night just experimenting with it and playing with it and just lining up sticks and logs and
making them parallel if you can keep them of a similar size you know whatever sticks are facing
each other are the same size you have like a you know two logs facing each other instead of a
log facing a little stick that works better too but you can also use like one great big log
on one side and then another maybe not as big but maybe smaller on the other side of the fire
and put a bunch of stuff in the middle of the metal so it works pretty good too i always had like
a saying that i made up i guess a little rule was that when the fires roar and you feed it when
it's dying you turn it really what that means is that while it's dying down all of the combustible
material that's exposed to the fire and to the heat has probably burned to the point where it's
either ash that isn't going to burn or it's like black char uh and it's and it's doing the job
of coal so that the orange flames are really not coming off of it anymore but if you turn it then
you get that hot log you know the combustible side of it is going to be facing the heat again and
your fire is going to flare right back up whereas when the fires roar and you got good orange
flames going and going well that's a good time to throw more logs on there because that hot
fire is going to be able to sustain you adding cold fuel and it's going to be able to get that going
and i'm just picking up a few more logs to throw on my fire now and when i when i do this
when i add the cold fuel like i said all my logs laying in the fire pit they're already burning
they're already kind of laying across the bottom of the pit and they're parallel to one another
so i'll take the fresh cold logs and i will lay them at 90 degrees to the burning logs they'll
be parallel to one another to each other but they'll be 90 degrees across from the logs that are
already burning that helps to get the air up through them and thus the flames up through them
and brings them up to temperature pretty quick and it lets them reflect their own heat at each
other and also downwards back at the logs that are already burning you know once they get going good
sometimes i'll turn them again and i mean you know make them parallel with the already burning logs
or sometimes you know those already burning logs are nothing but colds and your fire just kind of
changes direction anyway but you know that's all naturally get the hang of it it's pretty easy
once you do it a couple of times but you know i struggled with it at first and once i learned how
to do it you know i became the guy you know whenever whenever we go to party people ask me to keep the
fire going and that really helps me to not feel so awkward and so out of place when i'm at a
party you know with a bunch of people to have some kind of purpose there and feel like i'm wanted
there helps me a lot like i said to get over my social awkwardness whether it's real or perceived
you know i got to do something to kind of get over myself that self-defeating feeling of you know
i don't really belong here or you know whatever it is and that's just one of the things that i do
like i said another one is learning to run the barbecue grill learning to cook hamburgers and hot
dogs on the grill properly and liking it you really you want to like what you're doing too
otherwise it just becomes a task you know you don't want that but it's great when you can
you know cook up some hot dogs and some hamburgers and maybe use some chicken if somebody brings that
over and uh nobody calls you the chef the whole night long and you know it's not not something
asked for and i readily tell people like how come you're always the guy cooking and i say well
that's because if i make myself useful here you'll invite me back next year i think they appreciate
that i've i've never been uh not invited back to it another party or another barbecue
that i've cooked at so that you know that seems to work for me and same thing with firetending
not everybody wants to do it and they don't mind you know letting you in there unless there's
somebody who wants to do it and you know let them have it or take turns or talk about the fire
even it's funny how you know it sounds dull and boring and small talk but you know hey yeah that
logs going good or oh there's a good pop there it's one of those things that you know we all go
to work every day we do our things you know for these moments of relaxation and tranquility and
a good campfire to me is one of those moments it's one of those things that makes life worth
the living and the work worth the doing and that kind of thing yeah i mean that's it really go out
and keep a fire going for your friends sometimes it's a lot of satisfaction out of it you get to
kind of watch it and analyze it and be a little technical about it it's fun so i think i've beaten
this topic into the ground if you've stuck in this long thank you very much for listening oh you
got something out of it thanks for listening to hacker public radio please contribute a show we're
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