Currently, in many «primitive» camping sites, it is illegal to start a fire unless you are clearly in a survival situation — you carry a stove or you eat Gorp. If you’re running ahead of the crowd, the Park Service Ranger is your last worry, so starting a fire is an option for:
• boiling drinking water
• warmth
• cooking food
• drying clothing (don’t do this to polypro, it shrinks)
• building your spirits.
Most of us start a fire (if we start one at all) the easy way — matches, fire starter or fire log, newspaper. In the wilderness, this can get a bit dodgy, due to the lack of things like newspaper, natural gas, pre-processed compressed wood logs, grates, chimneys, and such.
Still, it can be done. Gather your wood, then build the fire pit. Remember to get ALL THE WAY TO DIRT if you are in a forest. If you just get down to packed wet leaves or pine needles, you may wake up a fricassee, as in a victim of a forest fire. For more specifics on pit construction, check the survival books in the references.
Technology can still help, there are a number of artificial flint/tinder sets on the market. There are small lenses available for daytime use, and for the truly trainable there are the old-fashioned methods of flint/steel (the commercial flints replace this) and fire bow. The main thing with the commercial flints is you now get to make your own tinder, which is easy if you remember a few basic rules:
• NO green wood
• Make small fuzzed pieces of dry wood that can catch and hold a spark
• Even if the wood has been wet, down branches will be dry in the middle, so split them with your knife to get to the dry wood
• Keep the tinder out of the wind
• Be patient
• Practice.
Once the tinder is going, be careful not to add too much too fast. You have to build up the base of the fire. As you add larger chunks of wood, remember a fire has to draw air from the bottom, so don’t just pile wood onto the twigs and tinder you are hoping will start the whole thing. One way to do things is to lean 3-4 small logs together like an «Indian» tipi, with the tinder in the middle. You have to have an opening large enough to work the flint without knocking the whole thing over, or you have to know how you’ll arrange things once the tinder is lit, but the method does work.
If you choose to take a stove of some description, it should be a multifuel backpacking variety. Face it, the supply of Coleman fuel will not be inexhaustible in the wild, but a stranded car may well be good for a pint or two of gasoline. Currently, Coleman (Peak 1 / Apex) and MSR about own the backpacking stove market, with MSR having (in my opinion) the best multifuel stoves on the market (Whisperlite International / XGK II,) although there is a multifuel Apex stove. Triangia makes an alcohol stove, which has good long term possibilities («white lightning,» anyone?,) but alcohol is actually not a good fuel, it burns cold relative to just about everything else. This also means Sterno is a waste of space and weight. Still, alcohol will be with us for a long time yet, and it’s better than nothing.
Stay away from propane stoves. Easy to use and inexpensive, they have trouble in cold weather (pressure drop) and are going to be about impossible to refill.
