Part III: Fire

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PREPARING THE SITE

Of course, before you can make a fire, you have to choose a spot for it. Your site should be free of any combustible brush, dried grasses, or leaves . . . away from low overhead branches . . . and not in an open, breezy area or on an exposed ridge. I also recommend (as I pointed out in my first article) setting your fire some six to ten feet—depending upon wind and weather conditions—away from your shelter entrance.

Once you've picked a site, dig out your fire pit. This dish-shaped hole should be about a foot deep and have gently sloping sides. The depression will cradle the fire, with its coals grouped toward the center, and thereby help your embers burn much longer than they would in a flat fire bed. Be sure, though, not to make the hole so deep that the pit will prevent your fire's heat from reaching you. And if you're digging in rich, loamy earth or soil that's full of root stems, line the bed with rocks to avoid the possibility of starting an underground fire. (Such blazes can actually pop up aboveground miles away, and months later!) Furthermore, use only stones gathered from a high, dry area for this—or any—fireplace job, since waterlogged rocks may explode when heated.

To increase the amount of useful warmth provided by the blaze, build a simple horseshoe-shaped reflector around the side opposite your position. Rocks, damp wood, or even earth can be used to make the semicircular heat-funneling structure. An experienced survivalist always builds fires with reflectors and tries to sit with his or her back against a tree, rock, or shelter. That way, the reflector can help warm the person's front and (by bouncing heat off the rear barrier) back as well. And with such a setup a small fire—which won't use up a lot of wood—can provide sufficient comfort.

An amateur, on the other hand, will often build a roaring blaze but leave it totally unbordered, and will therefore have to spend the night spinning at various speeds to keep one side of his or her body from freezing and the other from burning! Indeed, the amount of turning around a person has to do to stay warm when sitting by a fire will tell you right away whether that individual has good woodcraft skills. (I call this "the spin indicator test".)

F INDING WOOD

Most people who attempt to start an outdoor fire are stopped in their tracks by one difficulty: locating dry wood. The cardi nal rule to remember in this situation is that any wood found on the ground will have soaked up moisture and will be quite hard to light, so never collect ground wood for fire-starting fuel. Instead, gather dead limbs from standing trees. This wood will always ignite easily. (In fact, even in the Olympic rain forest—which gets 88 inches of rain a year—it's possible to pull a dead branch off a Douglas fir, whittle away only 1/8" of its outer surface, and find dry fuel.)

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