Dakota Fire Hole, Spooky Story and German Cutlery Set - UK Bushcraft

Hello there, welcome back. In this video, I'm going to be making something called a Dakota fire pit or Dakota fire hole. Now, this is the sort of fire that's very popular with the military because it keeps a very low profile and ideally it produces no smoke. I'm actually going to build mine here below quite a big branch, which is yet to get leaves on. But when it does get leaves on, hopefully those leaves will disperse any smoke that is generated. So I'm going to build it just here in this reasonably open area. About 10 yards away from my shelter, which is just behind me there. And this is going to be primarily used for cooking. Because it's going to be in the ground, it doesn't give out much heat. It doesn't radiate much heat, so it's not a very good one if you want to keep warm. But it is good for cooking, and it is good as a stealth fire. So, let's get started. I'm using my little Chafon emergency shovel again. Very good tool, this. If you don't know what it is, just check out one of my previous videos where I reviewed it and gave it a good old test. So I'm going to use that primarily for the removal of dirt. I'm actually going to dig the hole more native style as it probably would have been done by native Americans. I think that's where the origins of this particular fire go back to. So to do that I need a pointy stick and in order to get a pointy stick I've been looking for hazel trees. Hazel grow extremely straight and they provide a I need a really strong, straight stick that I can put a point on. And used to dig the hole. That one's pretty good. Don't worry about chopping these down. They will regenerate very fast. Ideally the hazel should be coppiced every few years. I.e. it should be cut right down. And then it grows back really strong. That looks pretty good. It's almost like a spear. Just using an ordinary little pen knife here. Which I'll give a brief review on in an upcoming video. Which end? This end. I'm going to sharpen the smallest end. So I've got the nice chunky end to grab hold of. Just sharpen it roughly into a point to make it easier to dig into the ground and churn the soil up. Basically what I'm going to do is dig a round hole here approximately nine to ten inches across but as it goes down it's going to go out into like a bell shape approximately 12 inches deep which is about 30 centimeters and then I'm going to dig a tunnel from here into the bottom of this pit. The idea is you put a fire in here And as it's drawn air in, it pulls it in through here and it acts almost like a like a jet engine. Really goes, goes very well, helps the wood burn a lot cleaner and it should reduce the smoke. And because the fire is going to be below ground level, anybody looking isn't going to see the characteristic glow of a campfire. I'll just start removing some of this soil and then I'll get in with a stick and do it properly. See when I'm driving the stick in, I'm going in at a bit of an angle and that's to give me the bell-shaped effect. Obviously, if you didn't have a shovel, you would just remove that by hand. But I have a shovel, so there's no point getting too dirty. Now, you'll notice that I'm just chucking the soil away down this bank side. It's because I want this to be a very, very low-profile fire. I don't want to just chuck the muck all around here, because anybody walking in the local area will be able to see it. Not that it really matters, because I've got permission to be in here anyway, but it wants to look nice and neat, you know? And I'll show you how to totally cover up your fire at the end of this video. We're almost down to depth now, actually. I'll just dig this loose stuff out the bottom, and then I'll get on to the little breather hole. Right. Going in from about here, roughly a foot away, which is 12 inches or 30 centimetres, I'm going to start jabbing the ground with a stick, create a hole no bigger than the blade width, which is approximately four to five inches. Obviously, it's going to be reasonably difficult to get in and dig all that muck out just with a shovel, so that's why I'm using this stick. It doesn't want to be a huge hole, this. Just a quick note if you're having problems doing this and to be honest cutting a little tunnel through the ground is pretty hard, you can just dig a trench, just dig an open trench, put stones across or put the sods of the, put the clods of the earth back across it so you've still got a tunnel and just leave one end open that's the easy way to do it but I'm doing it kind of I wouldn't say properly, because there's more than one way to do anything, but I'm doing it more authentically, should I say. Now you can imagine trying to dig at an angle with a little spade is very difficult. That's why most people just go with the trench idea. Okay, this is the view from above. That's our main fire hole. This is the little breather hole. See the ground there is still totally solid. And there's literally just been a tunnel dug through there. So as the fire's drawn air in, it's pulling it in through this little hole and hopefully providing a bit of a rocket effect. That's pretty good, the light's just about right there. See down both holes. Very, very low profile. I mean, I can hardly see it on the viewfinder there. You're probably gonna be able to see it reasonably well there, although pretty well disguised. Right, now all I need to do is gather some tinder, little bit of firewood, and light a fire. I always like to give you a rough idea of how long the tasks I do take. That was probably quarter of an hour, 15 minutes or thereabouts. That includes moving the cameras around and so on. So I suppose if you're in a hurry, you could do it in five to ten. That's not bad. It was pretty good digging, though. There was no major roots, and everything came out really well. Now, this little clip is totally out of sync. This is as I'm actually leaving. So you haven't time-travelled. Don't worry. I haven't missed anything. But on the way here, I actually saw a really fat roe deer. It looked like it was just about to give birth. It's the time of year, so... Quickly videoed it, but I didn't disturb it. If I'd hung around long enough, I probably could have got a video of it giving birth. It looked that close, but best just to leave it. I know where there's three or four deer locally, and I see them every single day. This was one of the female ones, one of the does. There's one buck and three does, and this one was huge. Here's a quick clip of it. Good old silver birch. You just know that without this tree, we'd be knackered for lighting fires in the UK. Most of the time, everywhere's wet, and if it's not wet, it's gonna be wet pretty soon. This stuff light fires even in damp conditions, as you've seen in plenty of my other videos. I absolutely love it. It really is, it's a lifesaver. Pretty much just a lifesaver. Right, we've got a nice little bed of sticks in there with a bit of birch bark on top. I'm just gonna drop a spark in there. Then use our kindling of different sizes to get it going. Just to give you some idea of the covert nature of this fire, here's the fire. I doubt you can see it on there, but it's definitely on. There's not a lick of smoke. It's absolutely raging in there already. It smoked for maybe a minute, two minutes, and now it's just blasting away. It's almost like I've got a fan on it. It's going exceptionally well. I'll bring the camera in to let you have a look down the hole now that it's going. There you go. Now there's our breather hole, and you can see by the direction of the flame, air's getting sucked in there, blowing up this back edge. Going really well. This'll be a good test for it. I've got some not-quite-dry rotten wood, and that smokes like hell. Just see how long it takes this smoke to clear. That flame's picking up really quick now. Probably no more than 30, 40 seconds after putting that wood on. Already the smoke is getting less. In fact, it's pretty much gone. That's incredible. That's incredible. That's... Probably less than a minute and already that manky wood is burning really, really well with very, very little smoke. Just an incredible amount of heat. And that's the thing about this, because it's an enclosed space, all the heat is driven out the top. So it's an excellent one for cooking. All right, this is looking back up from my shelter to where the cooking spot is. And the fire is roughly here. You'll be able to see a little bit of heat shimmer here, but the fire itself is absolutely invisible. Now I was lucky enough to be able to salvage a little bit of mesh from a huge log jam down in the river there. So I'm going to put this across here and I'm going to use that for cooking on. Absolutely perfect. Unbelievable how much heat's coming out of there. I'm just going to drop a couple of stones, one on each end, just to support that, make it solid. Right, now that I've got that well stocked up, I'm going to go and get a little bit of wild garlic and hopefully something with a little bit of a peppery kick as well. I think this area's going to have both of the plants that I'm looking for. Bingo! Wild garlic. I'll put the scientific name in the video description, and that's going to give us a lovely garlicky taste. Now although all this plant tastes garlicky, and you can eat the whole lot, even the flowers and the leaves, very, very garlicky. I'm just going to take some of the bulbs at the bottom. Actually, I don't think there's any need. Yeah, there's no need to take all of them. I'm just going to replant this one. Awesome, job's a good'un. Let's get these washed. There you go, that'll do me. There's the remainder of that plant replanted and I've got a little tub of chopped onions here. I'm going to add the garlic to that. Yes, my breath is going to stink. Now I mentioned I wanted something peppery. That's what we're going to use, watercress. That's it there. It hasn't got the flowers on yet. Gets little white clusters of flowers. Just starting there. But basically, in amongst all this mixed vegetation, is a really nice peppery salad plant, watercress. That'll do. I don't want masses of this. Quick wash, put it in there. Smell of garlic and onion is unbelievable. Certainly be no vampires around me tonight. Right then, let's get our onions and garlic in here. Then into that, we're having some stewed steak and gravy. Yes, it's not a proper bushcraft dinner, but it'll do. And I hope this tastes better than it looks. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it just looks awful. Now, if you remember, at the start of the video, I said this fire would be invisible. Now because I've got these two stones already here, all I've got to do is put the smaller one over the little hole, big one over the big hole. In fact I'm going to do that while the fire's still on, see if any smoke comes out. There's our big hole plugged up. Obviously you want to do this when the fire's out, but that pretty much covers it up. I just want to give shout outs to a couple of channels who've had the Dakota fire pits in their videos recently. First one... There's a guy who's quite local to me, called OOACamping, check his videos out, the link is in the video description, he's a great lad, and another great fella is Kulkraven Bushcraft, he, god, he seems to put a video out every two or three days, he practically lives in the woods, so, well, just check him out, check both of them out, both great guys, both deserve your attention, so, check the links out in the video description. You know, really, in my videos I should do shoutouts. Because I'm in a position to do that. I've got quite a reasonable amount of subscribers, you know. But all too often I forget. It's not that I don't want to give any attention to any other channels. Because I communicate with loads of other channels on all different sorts of topics. I just forget. Because I never plan what I'm going to do in my videos. I get a spare hour and literally just jump onto a bike or get the fishing rod or get the detector out. Or get into the woods and build something. It's all very much spur of the moment, you know. And then when I put the video out. I get people commenting saying, can you do me a shout-out? And I say, sure, no problem. And then I'll forget for the next one, you know. So I'm going to have to start doing that. So I do apologise to anybody who I've said I'm going to do a shout-out for and I haven't got around to doing it. Let me know in the comments if you want one, and I'll do one. Also, if you've got a channel and you've got a similar video to mine on any of the topics that I do, feel free to put the links in the comments. You know, they will get marked as spam by YouTube. But I always just unspam them, so if you want to spread the word about your channel, you're free to do it in the comments, you know, no problem. Believe it or not, even after all the garlic and onions that I put in here, you can still get that little punch from the watercress, still that little peppery taste just hits you now and again. Now, sitting watching me eat is a pretty boring thing, because to be honest my table manners aren't the best, so I might as well tell you a story about one time when I was in this wood, it's the most... frightened and also the most intrigued that I've ever been. I was walking along a footpath heading upstream and as normal I was looking for animal tracks and signs on the path in the woodland. All of a sudden I noticed that there was no bird song at all. I mean today you hear the birds singing all over the place and it was in the summer they should have been absolutely singing their hearts out but for whatever reason the woodland was absolutely dead. I looked down And you're probably going to think this is a shaggy dog story or a shaggy cat story, but there was a cat footprint and its pad had to have been the size of the palm of my hand with the finger marks as well. Totally a cat. 100% a cat. Huge brambles on one side of the path, huge brambles on the other side of the path. Numerous places where animals have been coming across the path and this had come across the path. And if that's not exciting enough... the fact that that footprint was in the process of filling with water from a nearby puddle made me realize that it had literally just minutes ago or even seconds ago passed in front of me across the path from the two areas of cover and i was absolutely buzzing of course i knew this thing was nearby um which also filled me with a little bit of dread so i got out the wood I flew straight up to the nearest town, bought some plaster of Paris, I thought I'm going to have a print of this, rushed back, I mean I was absolutely panting by the time I got there, with the plaster of Paris and some water, I had to mix it up with a little bowl and everything, you know, and unfortunately the local hunt had been through and ploughed up the footpath, absolutely ploughed it up because it was quite clay, it was quite wet, you know, totally destroyed the evidence. I was gutted at that, absolutely gutted. That was way back before I had camera phones as well, so even if I'd had my phone or a video camera, I could have got some sort of picture of it, you know? But it just wasn't to be, and I've never seen another print since. Just a quick note on the cutlery that I was using there. Well, on the can opener and the spoon. I didn't use a knife and fork, but that's a full set. It's a German Army set. I'll put the link to where I got it from in the video description. I think it was on Amazon. And whilst it definitely isn't lightweight, it's very, very well constructed. And that's actually quite sharp, serrated, so that will be useful for cutting through meat. And on the thing that holds the knife, fork and spoon, you've got a can opener and a bottle opener as well. So basically that all just slots in there. So really it just slots inside this little holder. Put a knife in, then you drop the fork in, then you drop the spoon in and it locks into place. I've got another set which has got little sticky up bits on the spoon and you slot the fork and the knife onto it. But they're forever coming off and you open your backpack up and you've got cutlery all over the place. But that, really solid. Very good. As I say, it's not lightweight, but it's a really strong, robust, stainless steel cutlery set. Very good. And it comes in a little pouch as well. You drop that in there and that keeps it clean. Good. Well that's the fire put to bed. It's still on smouldering in that pit but it's not going to catch a light to anything. Literally just a little bit of smoke coming out around the edges of the stone. Really, really covert way to make fire and cook. Thanks very much for watching. If you've enjoyed this video, the chances are you might enjoy one or two of my other videos. Now all the videos I've got are in playlists, so if you go to the channel Scroll down the page, you'll see all the different playlists. There's quite a varied selection there. So find something that you're interested in. I mean, it might be fishing and shooting. Click on there, that'll bring all the fishing and shooting videos up and you'll have hours of entertainment there. Thank you for watching. Catch you next time. Feel free to share this video wherever you want and happy bushcrafting. Right, so we've got the adult rabbit and the young one. Two young ones, possibly more young ones. Plus a young one that Angus has just brought me, so that looks like a sensible place to let them go. There is a set down there next to the tree so I assume that's where they're from. Will Angus you stay up here while I let this rabbit go? And just to confirm, there's going in the bin. Not being left in the wood.