Survival Skills 101: To Build a Fire

January Jump: Make Preparedness Notebook; Build Fire; Create a Home-Escape Plan (hopefully not needed directly upon building fire)

Completed: Build Fire

For months, I’ve been happy to load the wood into our stove, but I refused to learn how to light it myself. Until this weekend, that is. On Saturday, I built a fire in our chiminea and wood stove.

* Crumpled the comics up real small (they’ll burn longer that way)

* Piled on a good amount of small, dry twigs in the classic tee pee formation.

* Lit the bottom of the newspaper balls with a lighter, and whoosh: fire!

* Ryan taught me how to build up some nice hot coals by adding wood that is successively bigger in size.

* Left the flu open until the stove was burning nice and hot.

* My chiminea fire even crisped the edges of some delicious marshmallows. If that’s not success, I don’t know what is.

* (And due to Ryan’s thorough lesson plans, I even learned how to rake the ashes through the grate in the morning and start a fire with last night’s coals. Bonus material.)

Here’s an article with more details about building a fire in all kinds of circumstances. This information is going straight into my Preparedness Notebook (that post is coming soon!).