Ray Mears - How to Light a Fire, Bushcraft Survival

Probably the most important of all the bushcraft skills is fire lighting. With fire we can dispel the darkness of the forest if we're lost or stranded somewhere or injured and with it dispel the negative spirits that could come into our mind and plant thoughts of defeat. We can drive away the cold that causes hypothermia, we can purify our water, we can cook our food. It is light where there is darkness. These are the basic principles for lighting a fire. First try to site your fire where you have access to fuel, very important. Secondly clear the ground down to bare earth if possible so that you are minimizing any risk of creating an uncontrollable fire. Always put a platform down on the ground first preferably made of dead wood. This has several purposes. First when I put this platform down it'll keep my tinder and my kindling away from moisture on the ground particularly if it's wet weather. Secondly it allows air to come in underneath and helps the fire to burn. In cold weather it provides insulation from the ground even today when the weather's hot that ground is cool the wood is warm but when the temperature drops to 50 below that can make the difference between success or failure at fire lighting. But most importantly of all when I light the fire these logs will begin to burn early on to create embers and a good heart to the fire that makes it certain to start and light properly. The next step is to provide ourselves with kindling. Little thin dead twigs like this are exactly right and a good thick bundle as well. What I like to do with this is to split that into half, two handfuls like so and to cross them over a pile of sticks. The next thing is underneath these sticks I'm going to put some tinder. Now I can use anything that's dry and fibrous, dry grass, dry bark, dry moss, anything like that but one of the best things of all is birch bark and I've got an old rotten log here and you can see how the wood has rotted but not the bark and the reason for that is that the bark is full of oil that's preservative and that oil burns extremely well so this will make very good tinder to fill that gap and I'll just shred that down so it's nice and thin and will take very easily from the small flame I'll introduce to the fire for ignition. The next thing is to get ready fuel to add to the kindling once I've ignited the kindling. This goes up to little finger thickness, I won't need any more than that for the time being, there's plenty of other thicker fuel within arm's reach that I can just grab as I need it. To start the fire I'm going to use sparks and to turn the sparks into a flame I'm also going to use some of the birch bark and I have to prepare that for lighting and I do that like this. The device I use to ignite the fire is called a fire flash and it's an alloy of metals that when scraped produces bright white sparks and you can use this to ignite many different materials. The way I use it is I place it on the bark close to the shavings and I use the back of my blade close to the point, I'll show you here to one side and I push forwards with the thumb of my left hand like this to shave off peelings of the metal. So what I'll do now is drop the sparks onto these shavings and when they catch light I'll move the flames in under the kindling.