How to Start a Fire in the Wilderness | Basic Instincts | WIRED

Fire is one of the most important and powerful primitive technologies. It opened up all kinds of potentials for us on all levels. My name is Bill Schindler. I am a professor of archeology and anthropology at Washington College and a primitive technologist and experimental archaeologist. Fire probably

start

ed as some kind of natural phenomenon like lightning, a forest

fire

would have caught our attention, we would have seen it and probably

start

ed to realize the benefits of

fire

over time, we could probably smell the cooked meat of the animals that they got caught in that fire and not only did they die but they were also cooked as a result of that we certainly would have seen the light we would have experienced the heat and the first kind of harnessing of the fire was probably making sure that that flame didn't go out, we were able to take that fire and transporting it to another place the fire requires only three things oxygen fuel and heat oxygen is already present in the air the fuel can be any combination of things that actually catch fire and retain that energy it can be wood it can be dung it can be grasses, we really need to focus on them, here is the heat, how the heat is generated and where it comes from.

The most primitive and ancient approaches to fire depend on friction to generate that heat, the first thing you should do if we are going to start a fire from scratch is to make or find a sharp edge if you have a knife, that's a no-brainer, but if not You got it, if you're in a survival situation, you'd have to create that sharp edge by striking. two rocks together to produce a sharp, durable edge and once you have that sharp edge you can cut the pieces of wood you need and, most importantly, modify their shape to fit them to make the fire.

The two most common ways to make a primitive fire are. the hand drill and the bow drill let's start with the most

basic

way to light a fire with a hand drill, so this is where the saying "you know how to rub two sticks together" comes from, but if you just grab two sticks and rub them together, the only warmth that You would be generating if your muscles move for hours and hours, you would never create a fire, so to make a real fire with your hands you need two pieces, you need a hearth board and you need an axle that rotates inside the hearth board.

Some of these pieces must be completely dry and made with the appropriate materials. The hearth board must be made of something that is not resinous, so it cannot be from a conifer, it cannot be hemlock, pine or spruce, and also. It has to be made of a wood that is somewhat soft. My test to see if this wood is the right type is to put my fingernail in it and see if it leaves a dent. If it does, it is probably the right material here in the Eastern Woods. I use wood from trees like linden or tulip poplar or cedar.

They are absolutely ideal. The spindle should not only be dry but it should be straight and should also be somewhat smooth. Fast-growing plants such as cattails or horseweed. or Mullen or even goldenrod work perfectly on materials like this horse grass that have all these little bumps. These bumps will break your hands and need to be removed, so if you take your stone tool and hold it perpendicular, you can scrape them off. and make it smooth once you have prepared the outside of the spindle and cut it to the proper length, you need to pay attention to the end, this end, the larger end, will sit inside the hearth board, inside the knot you create and You should make sure it is a very clean cut.

These little frayed pieces are going to disrupt the pilot dust you're spending all this time creating, it will disperse it and you won't be able to start a fire if you don't grab that rock. keep it perpendicular and very gently scrape the edge once you have prepared the shaft. The most important thing to remember is not to leave it on the ground, even if you think the ground is dry, it is not and if there is moisture. reaches the end, it will be a failed attempt to make a fire, so once it is prepared, set it aside somewhere where it will stay dry, the next thing to do is prepare the hearth board, the hearth board can be separate the right size to fit me, I can split the end, I can carve it, but what I'm really looking for when I'm ready to start is something that's about a quarter inch or 3/8 inch thick, it should be flat . at the bottom so it can sit there without rocking, so if you start with a round stick like this, you can split it on both sides or you can carve it to get those flat surfaces after you've reached the flat surface.

We need to create a groove in which the spindle sits and spins without jumping. The last thing you want to do is spend all your time and effort and get so close to making charcoal and then the spindle comes out and everything has failed and you have to start over, so I'm going to take this flake that I made and use it to create that gap. The good thing about these stone flakes is that they have different surfaces. so I can start the slit with this part and I can widen it with this part. What I'm going to do here is actually not do anything to start the fire.

In fact, I'm going to use this shaft for a moment as a drill. I want to drill that hole to make sure it's seated and doesn't explode anywhere, very slowly, very deliberately with a little bit of downward force. I want to use this shaft as a drill. I've created the indentation I need for this shaft, but you'll notice. I'm also creating dust and it's building up around the outside of this hole. The dust will never ignite if it is distributed like this around the outside of the hole. I need to create an indentation where all that dust will fall and form a single solid. powerful charcoal to do that I'm going to take my stone and I'm going to carve the notch and what I'm looking for is like this one here, it's going to look like a slice of cake or a slice of pizza and the center of that knot should point to the center of that hole and it should widen at an angle of approximately 30 degrees or so by the time you reach the edge of the wood.

Your final movement after creating that knot should always be downward because if you don't want any of those little fibers in the wood sticking out, it's going to disrupt your ability to form that nice bundle. What I do next will determine the success or failure of this fire. I need to make sure that everything I need After creating a coal, is available to me in the right place, so the first thing we need is a tinder pack that will take that burning coal and turn it into a flame. I love using cedar bark, the inner bark of the cedar.

The tree is perfect for this application this is what it looks like when I take it off the tree and to turn it into a tinder pack I need to make sure to increase the surface area to be able to allow it to light at a low temperature and air speed so it can take it and move it like this. I'm breaking and separating those fibers. I need to split the difference between separating this and allowing a lot of air to pass through and making sure there isn't a big hole that the ember will flow through something like this is perfect and like with all my other materials I don't want to place this on the wet ground once it's done I'll pick up anything that falls off and glue it down. okay again, I'm going to start this fire right here in front of me, it's been raining for four days straight, these are actually the worst conditions to try to start a fire with a hand drill, however, you know, one of The things I need to worry about, which isn't a big deal right now is the possibility of this fire spreading, but I'm still going to remove some of these leaves.

You know, I want to get to the bare mineral soil, the other one. What I need to do before I even try to turn on my hand drill is get all the wood ready so what I want to do is take this wood and sort it by size and I'll start with the smallest and move on to the largest start a fire with A hand drill in the woods is an incredibly difficult thing to do, it requires a lot of skill and a lot of energy, if you get to the scene, you really catch a cold, the last thing you want to do is compromise your ability to make a fire by not having all your materials ready, It's worth the effort to spend five minutes doing this to your firewood, okay, I have my firewood ready, the last two pieces I need now that I have everything prepared in front of me is something that catches the ember, this piece of birch bark It works very well.

I could use a very dry leaf, a small piece of wood and I'll use that to place it right under the notch that I created and it will collect the dust once the dust is collected. It turns into an ember. I can take that, pick it up, and transfer it very easily to my tinder pack. The last thing I need is to have a little piece of stick ready because that ember, that dust, will work almost like glue and will want to stick to my hearth board and I'm going to use this stick to hold the ember in place while I remove the hearth board to not disturb it.

You must make sure that this hearth board does not move. One thing we have done to achieve this is to flatten the bottom of the hearth board. The second thing we could do is hold the sides if there is someone else with you have them hold it, if not you will have to hold it. to hold it with your foot or you can take a stick like this and kneel on it the spindle goes into place and you have to lick your hands especially on a cold day like this my hands really have to grab this spindle and the spindle You have to move around and start looking for nice, smooth things, make sure the bottom of the shaft doesn't come out of the hole, make sure there's nothing interfering with your hands if you feel your hands starting to get a little dry, stop now yourself and be sure to lick them again.

I want to make sure that I'm drying that board, starting to heat it up, starting to make dust and I can do that by moving very, very slowly. The other thing I need to ensure. What I'm doing is using my entire hand every time I turn my hands. I'm turning this shaft and it generates heat and dust as soon as I stop it it cools down and I go back the other way if I use my whole hand. fingertip to palm getting more rotations before it cools down, the other thing you'll notice is that if you're generating downward pressure, which you should be, your hands will slowly move down the shaft, when you get to the bottom, you will stop holding. with one hand continue to apply downward pressure grab the top of the other continue to apply downward pressure and reposition your hands up and continue again.

This may take more than one go, but I'd love to have it all in one to make it happen. Be awesome so motherfucker it broke let me try it for you so you don't want this fireplace board to move so the easiest way to do it is with the side of your foot so it's cold it's wet, my hands are dry. I'm tired of trying to do this though. It's the best I can do now. Just take a short break. I'm going to take off this shirt. It's much better to show it when the hands are doing everything.

I have it. okay, we have the coal, we have to use this stick, keep the coal intact and we are going to let this coal grow, the more it grows, the stronger it will become and I will need all that strength to transfer this really weak coal to this one. tinder packet my job is to keep it in one place in a ball it is possible when I transfer it I am blowing very gently to provide the oxygen I am holding it at the bottom because the flames are going to go up and we have flame.

I'll put this on the ground. I don't have a fire yet, the only thing I have is a flame. I'm going to take my smaller pieces of wood and put them on top. By placing these sticks on top I will naturally form a tipi, that is the shape it takes. We're starting to turn on some of the smaller things right here, the energy in that system is building up, it's gone from tinder to something bigger, which means it's getting stronger and I'm slowly going to increase the size of the sticks and then I'll be. In fact, that's all I need to make a bow drill is kind of a hand drill on steroids and a bow drill requires a hearth board and a spindle, but it also requires a bow that, instead of hands, is used to rotate the spindle.

That's when you use your hands to create and generate heat to spin the spindle, you only have the length of your hand to spin it until it stops for a moment and goes in the opposite direction and that pause for that fraction of a second. allows this system to cool down, so if you can extend that distance, turn the spindle without having to stop and reverse direction, it's an incredible advantage, so if you take a bow that is essentially a stick with a string on it and you wrap it around . around that spindle, you have the entire length of that rope to go in one direction without having to stop and move in the other direction.

The other part of the bow drill that provides an advantage is a handpiece and that handpiece sits on top of the spindle. and it provides the downward pressure so immediately when you add the bow and the handle, you increase the speed, you increase the number of rotations before stopping and you let it cool down in the reverse direction and you increase the pressure, it's much easier. to make that fire and often much faster to make that fire, so to make a bow drill you need to make a bow. Thiscurved piece of wood works great, but you can actually use almost any piece of wood as long as you attach the axle. the right way so that it is on the outside of the string, even a straight piece of wood will work fine, but what you really need to do for this to be successful is make a string that wraps around the shaft and there are a few different ways.

To do this if you are in a survival situation and you are wearing shoes or boots with laces you can obviously use the laces but other options include things like natural plant fibers like this oleander here which produces amazing fibers you can extract these fibers and just twist them together. those fibers to form a really strong piece of rope. The problem is that there is so much pressure and friction in this entire system that the natural plant fibers wear out quite quickly. My favorite way to make a bow drill string is to use rawhide. or to use leather, this is a piece of brain tanned deerskin and I'm going to show you how to quickly make a rope that will not only make this fire successful, but you can also use it for successful fires in the future.

I can use this sharp as a razor. I shred it and use it to cut this piece of leather into a spiral shape and I can make a very long rope out of it. I'm going to fold it over itself and make a two layer cord with it which will more than double its strength it will also make this rope more round which will make it more successful for me and it will also form a loop in the end that will allow me to attach it very easily to the bow, so this will be a two-ply string and, in fact, this is the way all the strings were made.

I twist it in opposite directions like this and twist it until it twists on itself and I'm going to hold that end. All I'm doing is "I'm taking both, twisting them in the same direction and then twisting them around each other in the opposite direction and it's going to hold them tight and I'm going to follow the line, twist and reverse, twist and reverse, here's the piece." full of string and what I can do is use that loop and go straight through and I'm going to stick this right on the end of my bow I've made a little notch here that's going to catch it. little slack so it wraps around the shaft, wrap it a few times this is my complete bow and string this is the shaft I use for the bow drill it is shorter than the hand drill shaft and it is also larger around it end should be pointed.

This is the end that is facing up and fits into the handpiece. If it is pointed, there is less surface contact and there is less energy loss and I can reshape it with this rock the lower end should be flat. or as flat as possible. The reason I make it flat is because I want that wide flat surface against the wide flat surface of the hearth board and there's more surface area, there's more contact, there's more friction and there's more Heat up the other piece of the bow drill set that you need is the handle. This handle should have as little friction as possible, which means it should be made of a hard material.

It can be made from a hard, sturdy piece of wood like this one. Osage orange can be made from a shell, a hard bone, or even a rock that has an indentation in it, so I need to create this indentation inside this handpiece so that it can accept the far end of the shaft if I'm doing this . On a rock I can take another rock and make a hole. If I'm going to do it on this piece of wood, I can use my flake and twist it like this to create this hole. Now I'm going to make that charcoal with a bow drill the similarities between a hand you're on the bow drill they both have a hearth board and they both have a spindle but the difference is I'm going to exert my pressure using a handhold on the top of the spindle and I'm going to spin that spindle using an arc instead of just my hands.

The advantage here is that that spindle can travel the entire length of the bowstring without stopping and cooling while reversing direction. The advantage of the handle is that I can apply a lot more pressure and I can use a much shorter shaft positioning is really important here. The first thing I will do is like with a hand drill. Let's put something under the hearth board to catch the embers. The second thing I will do. What I have to do is position my body so that everything is locked in place and nothing moves and I'm going to take my left hand, which is a hand that holds the top of the shaft, and I'm going to lock it around this knee and on my shin and so on.

With the hand drill, when I move this bow, I also want to reduce the friction on the string, so you see, if I tilt this bow a little bit, it separates those strings and if I do that, that means they don't rub against each other. The rope is going to last a lot longer, so I lowered it a little bit, but I still move my right hand parallel to the ground, I started off nice and slow, but all of a sudden you can see this smoke faster than with the hand drill, okay, I need to stop now and remove something because what happened is it's slipping because there's a crack in the wood, so I'm going to take two seconds and make another notch real quick so my spindle doesn't come out, you see smoke coming out of the stack. of dust, so I'm going to take this stick, put it in the back, hold the ember in place and remove the hearth board.

This ember is what I'm going to use to transfer to my tinder. make a bundle and then blow that into a flame and there's my coal. How you light your fire is largely influenced by what you are trying to achieve whether you want light or heat. My favorite fire is a tipi fire by default if you take a bundle of tinder place it on the ground and slowly start placing increasing sizes of wood on top it naturally forms a tipi if you want a fire to light you want big flames you have wood organized in such a way that there is a lot of air between it and a large amount of air between that wood allows not only the introduction of a large amount of oxygen, but there are many individual pieces of wood that act as individual pieces of wood and they all burn extremely fast and that is generates a lot of heat and a lot of light, it doesn't generate many embers in most situations, when you want a fire to cook with, you want a good bed of embers.

I found that the best way to start a fire for cooking is to use parallel. Recording Method This method is something I learned while living with the Hodza in Tanzania. What was explained to me was that a bed of coals was created as quickly as possible so that they would start the same way they started lighting the fire. They would put sticks on top, superficially it would look like a teepee and they would talk about going and then they would place all the logs on top of each other parallel to each other and orient the direction of the logs with the direction of the wind. so the winds coming through the middle you can only do this once you've already accumulated enough coals to reorganize the fire.

This is an ideal place to build the largest coal bed as quickly as possible and the reason is because I have actually closed that air gap. I'm placing these logs close enough so instead of burning in big flames, they actually burn a little slower and produce those coals, but I have enough air space and allow the wind blowing between these to stay lit. I have built this incredible bed of coals in a short time using the parallel fire method so I can cook on this fire. I need to spread these coals out, get a nice bed of hot coals and in this spot here I'm going to put the meat directly on top of the coals, okay, so the meats are ready, although you may never find yourself in a situation of survival.

I firmly believe that learning and practicing these primitive skills is an essential part of connecting. with your past, your environment and everything it means to be you