How to Make a Fire Even in the Windiest, Wettest Conditions

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In her monthly column, The Survivalist, Jessie Krebs writes about staying alive in dangerous backcountry scenarios. Krebs is a former Air Force S.E.R.E (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) instructor and owner of O.W.L.S. Skills.

Like many survival skills, the best way to learn how to build a fire is to get outside in all kinds of weather with limited resources and practice. That being said, there are some basic principles that can drastically increase your odds of successfully sparking and growing a blaze.

Every fire is unique; addressing some simple questions before you get started can go a long way toward increasing your efficiency and odds of success.

Location

Put some thought into this. Where you choose to build a fire can have a big influence on your success in starting it, its usefulness, how safe it is, and the ease of cleaning up after you’re finished with it. Especially in bad weather, choose a location where you can easily build a shelter over your fire. In a downpour, construct a shelter first, then prepare your fire under it.

Purpose

What’s your goal? Fire can be used for all sorts of things: Warmth, light, deterring bugs, signaling for help, making tools, cooking food, boiling water, sterilizing bandages, improving morale, keeping predators at bay, and more. What you use it for plays a big part in where you put it. You’ll want to situate a signal fire someplace with good visibility, but if it’s for warmth and light you may want it near your shelter or in a more protected area. If there are large predators around, consider a separate cooking fire downwind and a good distance from your shelter fire.

Safety

Before building your fire, find or make a good fire circle. Digging a pit or making a rock ring is not necessary, but at minimum, you’ll need to clear a circle to bare mineral soil that’s at least 3 feet from the fire’s edge in all directions. If you’re making a big bonfire, clear at least 15 feet out from the edge. Pile the duff and debris outside of your circle 90° from the wind direction to prevent sparks from flying out and igniting it.

In especially dry conditions you may want a spark arrester above the fire. This will knock sparks down into your fire circle rather than allowing them to fly upward and ignite outside of your fire ring. Tie sturdy material like a tarp or rain fly horizontally above the fire with at least three feet of space between the cloth and the top of the flames. Make sure your fire circle is cleared to a few feet beyond the spark arrester. 

A shovel and bucket of water is pretty useful, but not usually available in a survival situation. Instead, a full hydration bladder or a large pile of mineral soil on a large sturdy piece of bark or cloth is good to have on hand so you can pick it up and dump it on wayward flames in a hurry.

Fuel 

Once the stage is prepared, it’s time to gather the set pieces. I’ll mostly focus on wood here, but don’t forget to think outside the box if you’re in an area where wood is scarce. There are a lot of things that you can burn in a pinch such as oils, dung, dense bundles of grass, repellents, wax, petroleum products, and methane. Look for the highest quality materials you can find to get your fire started. 

Fire is like a living thing: When it’s a baby, it’s fragile and can only consume certain fuels without choking and dying. Having a system and plenty of “foods” that are easily digestible is one of the main keys to success. There are a minimum of three stages for fuel: tinder, kindling, and fuel. Tinder has been broken down so it can light with anything from a tiny coal to a small flame. Kindling is anywhere from pencil lead to pencil-size in diameter and usually a minimum of about 8 inches long. Primary fuels should be thumb size or wider and at least a foot long. 

When in the backcountry, carry tinder and at least two methods to ignite it. If you lose your tinder or don’t have any, it should be the first thing you gather and the last thing you prepare before lighting. Gather several different types of potential tinders, keeping them separate, and put them in warm, dry areas of your clothing while you prepare your fire area and collect and prep your other fuels. 

Gathering Fuel

Gather and prepare three times the amount of fuel you think you’ll need for each stage before attempting to light your fire. If you go up a stage and your fire starts to choke, you’ll need more of the prior stage to keep it fed and growing.

Go uphill to gather wood. There are two basic styles of wood fires to consider based on the environment. If things are dry and/or consistently below freezing, branch fires are fast and easy. In S.E.R.E., we say “if it doesn’t snap, scrap.” If the branches are soaked and rubbery, refusing to snap, you’ll need to make a split wood fire. This takes a lot more time, energy, and skill. Look for small dead-standing trees (4 inches or so at the base and vertical), knock several over, and carry them downhill to camp to snap them into smaller sections. Then baton or split them with a knife or hatchet to get to the dry wood inside.

Leave a fuel buffer—a few days’ worth—around your fire circle. There is both a practical and an aesthetic reason for this. As a survival situation lengthens, the likelihood of injury, illness, weakness, and so on increases, making gathering firewood more difficult. The buffer becomes your emergency wood. On another level, if everyone dispersed their gathering instead of grabbing and ripping up what’s close and easy, the woods would look more like wilderness and less like a park. Only use what you need—dead trees and limbs are often the houses and grocery stores of forest creatures. 

Building your Fire

While there are many fire construction methods out there, I suggest using a platform and a brace. Fire needs three things to exist: heat, oxygen, and fuel. When starting a fire, you need to balance these three things carefully, and a platform and brace allow you to adjust quickly based on what the fire needs. A platform supports the fire and is preferably dry and reasonably flat. A brace is usually about fist-high distance off the platform, allowing you to prop kindling above the tinder so it doesn’t snuff it. It also allows you to quickly lift or lower the kindling depending on the fire’s needs. Most of the time, I use a large piece of bark for my platform and a one-foot-long or so forearm-diameter branch for my brace.

Ignition

There is no such thing as cheating in survival: Practice with whatever ignition source you like and get good at it. Carry a lighter if you like, or five. Know that when butane is cold it won’t light, so warm it up in your pocket or armpit for 5 minutes before using. If you carry a ferro rod, matches, a fresnel lens, or whatever, practice with it—when it’s wet, when you can’t feel your fingers, one handed, with less-than-optimal tinders. A lighter is more foolproof, so I always carry one, too. 

Extinguishing the Fire

I like wilderness, and I get bummed out seeing another rock ring with old charcoal in it every 50 feet. Coals stop burning down because folks tend to pile them into a cone shape and as the ash forms on the outside it suffocates the coals. When they can’t get oxygen anymore, they go out instead of burning down, leaving a big bed of partially burned wood and coals behind. 

It’s pretty simple to burn charcoal down to white ash before putting it out. About an hour prior to extinguishing your fire, start using wood that is thumb-size in diameter or smaller on the fire and begin spreading out and flattening the coal bed. Stir it gently every five minutes or so and fan it with a pot lid or non-inflatable sleeping pad. Toss partially-burned wood ends into the center. Once the remaining coals are pencil eraser size or smaller, add water or (in an emergency situation) soil and mix to finish putting it out. The next morning, crush and scatter or bury any larger coals. After making sure the ground is cold to the touch, scatter the duff and debris you cleared back over the area, making it look as natural as possible. If you used a rock ring, put the rocks back with the blackened side down. Don’t try to burn down aluminum foil, cans, other metal, or glass.