How to Make a Great Campfire

Building your own fire is an essential skill for anyone who spends time in the outdoors. Not only is it one of the most satisfying parts of camping, it can be a lifesaving skill.

Poorly managed fires can also be one of the most dangerous and destructive elements to our forests and the wildlife that call our wild places home.

While you want to get warm and enjoy that lovely fire, nobody wants to be responsible for a forest fire. Here’s how to build a fire safely and according to Leave No Trace standards.

Choose the site

If there is already an impacted site, such as an existing fire ring, use that one. If you building a fire in a pristine wilderness area without previously built fire sites, choose a spot that will have the least impact. I like to layer dirt on top of a fresh site to protect the organic material and roots below. This will also make clean up easier afterwards.

Collect fuel responsibly

Using Leave No Trace methods, pick up dead, down, and detached sticks and branches. This means the firewood, or fuel, is already on the ground. As a rule of thumb, look for firewood that is smaller in diameter than your wrist. It will burn more quickly and you’re less likely to have an ugly charred log that remains after your fire. Do not rip branches off trees. It makes the human impact obvious and can be harmful to trees.

Starter fuel and kindling

If you are in a wet environment, this is especially important. I live in the desert, where fires practically start themselves. Pine needles, moss, cat tails, and fibrous bark make great fire starters (my favorite is juniper bark, it's fire-starting gold). Start small with twigs and build around a nest of fire starting material. Some people like to build teepee-style structures. But those people are wrong and should be banned from camping. The only true way to build a fire is using the log-cabin technique, as it maximizes air-flow and it's easy to build on top of once the fire is going. Most people fail at starting fires by adding large logs too quickly, or by not properly and patiently building a quality initial structure. Don't wait until the fire starts to scrounge for enough twigs and sticks to get the fire going, rookie! Prepare well and your fire will fare well.

What is everything is damp?

Starting a fire in damp conditions can be tough even for the most experienced guides and outdoorsy types. Having a little bit of dry tinder, like juniper bark, cotton balls soaked in vaseline, lint from a dryer, or firestarting products like UCO’s can make this much easier. Using a knife or hatchet, I’ll try to break up wet sticks to expose the dry interior of the wood. Unless the wood is completely soaked, there’s almost always a way to get at dry wood inside the branch.

Upon starting a fire, I’ll start building a small wall of sticks and branches that surround the fire, but is not IN the fire. This is to dry out the surrounding wood as the fire burns. As sticks dry out, add them to the fire and keep more wood drying out on the wall. This works well if the wood is not hopelessly soaked.

Clean up

As your fire winds down, you can help ensure you will leave behind a clean fire pit (or no fire pit at all) by burning the logs all the way down to small embers. By adding small sticks, twigs, and bark that burn hot, you can expedite the process make sure you will not leave behind have charred logs that smoke and smolder all night (and beyond). Drown out your fire using plenty of water. Do not simply cover the fire with dirt or rocks and move on, as embers and coals will remain hot for a long time. Neglected camp fires are a common source of forest fires. Don't be that person! If you are in pristine wilderness area, clean up your fire site by crushing the coals and distributing the ash and NOT HOT coals into the surrounding area. Sometimes I use a trowel or the heat reflective shield from my stove to distribute the ashes. Make the site look like no one has been there before.

For tricks to get a good campfire going and best practices to make sure you Leave No Trace, check out the following video.