How to make firebundles -- storable, ready-to-light campfires

Description

Fire bundles are ready-to-light campfires in a bundle. Easy to make, you can store them in a dry place at your adventuring camp, and can easily start a fire in those moments when you don't have time to build one, such as when darkness is swiftly falling, or a sudden rainstorm is getting everything wet outside your shelter. Or if you are just feeling lazy =)

Other skills are demonstrated in this video. To learn about the upside-down fire technique that is used, visit: https://youtu.be/cseesOs-93M, and for a hand drill tutorial, visit: https://youtu.be/ScmQxuRrFww

Visit http://rewildu.com/classes/ for unique educational opportunities in rewilding, wilderness skills, mindfulness, martial arts, primal fitness, homesteading, and more.

Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods,fire making,campfires

Video Transcription

when I was in my early teens my brother and I used to run round and wander in the woods go adventuring with two friends of ours up one we all had woods names so one was named white crow the other she was named swift fox and we had tons of fun out there the adventures are tales for another day but there was one way that any of us to become the hero of the adventure especially if it was an overnight and here's how we did it if you were the one that got out of your sleeping bag in the cold morning and you gathered up materials and started a fire you were the hero or the heroine of the story because everybody else would be watching you're shivering and then they get to come out and warm their hands over a fire well flash forward many years later and this is a technique that I came up with maybe other people do this I haven't seen it before I call it fire bundles and this is intended for it could just be an overnight camp but it really comes into play if you're doing longer term outings and sometimes if we're not really good about keeping a good supply of firewood it can be tough to get to get a fire started can take a lot of time we're gathering through materials it's getting dark so higher bundles are they're very easy to build and I'll show you exactly how here and you can keep make five or six of these at a time keep them in your camp and all you have to do when you're ready for a fire is take out one of your fire bundles set it onto the fire pit and start it up and it will turn into a nice little campfire all by itself from there of course you can add more but it gets you started it's easy it's convenient and requires only a small initial investment

and time and gathering I'm going to walk us through two different types of fire bundles today you can make these with any of your local materials and I have chosen to make one here that's going to be a bigger more robust one that's made out of materials gathered from the field kind of field forest edge so this is Bach cellar which is a species of maple and there's goldenrod and just other grasses and such that I found and you can see what i've done is i have arranged these in order from my thickest ones all the way down to my most flammable type materials and I've also taken the time with some of these two just

split them open so they're going to burn a little bit better I try to do that with a few sticks in each layer which will make sense in a moment the other one that I'll show you how to make is these are two pine boughs dried pine boughs and break off easily from the bottom of a white pine tree and these are marvelous because you have everything you need basically for your fire from your tiniest little whisk your thin sticks up here all the way to thicker ones

and it's already graduated for you so all you have to do is is pull it apart and lay out your fire another important thing material for these bundles is to have a bottom layer this is a piece of pic to the Aspen bark and that's going to be the bottom of this one birch just some scrap pieces from an old down birch iphone I'm going to use for the pine bough one finally need some sort of a tying material jute fiber you could use I'm going to use this grapevine for one of them a treatment one of my students uses right now that he figured out it won't work with these because they're too short but he takes a longer strip of birch bark and just warms it over the fire and as it warms it curls up and then he can uncurl it and fold it around and it's a natural hole to hold these bundles together here's what you do you take your bottom bark layer we lay it down and you're basically building an upside-down fire so I'm going to start like this in the same way that I do an upside-down fire I'm going to be leaving a little bit of space between my layer between the sticks in the lair a little bit of space for things to fall down

once you get going it's pretty easy to build

and here's another little trick this is a piece of both fungus tinder fungus and you can always set one of these in here and it gives you a little extra insurance policy and that if for whatever reason your fire don't take you could reach in you'd still have a good call now when you build these important to remember to give breathing space so if I really am careful and I tightly pack everything then I'm not going to give it ere and of course like any other fire this is going to need air and especially because what I'm going to try to do now is tie this up into a little package it's going to work a lot nicer if there's air built into this structure because I'm going to squash it down when I tie it additional tip is to remember to put your cordage down under there beforehand

spread this out a little bit and there I have a nice fire bundle it's basically an upside-down fire that is is ready to go I can set that into the dry place in my camp and the next step that will try is to set it on fire okay I didn't make you watch the whole process of putting together this one but again this one is just three materials it's the birch bark which is on the bottom and I've layered it a little bit throughout the structure of the upside down fire it's white pine that nice graduated branch that breaks down to create such beautiful layers and it's a piece of grapevine to hold it all together and these are just real nice portable buyers that you can pick up you can put in the corner you can bring them out and let's see if they start up how long they burn one thing I'm going to do when I'm ready to start you can untie my grapevine here didn't work so up but you can untie or you can just leave it this one I'm going to leave it but I'm just going to kind of fluff things up and prepare it to show that you could just bring it out set it down and go nice wind today will do the work of blowing it for me let's see if I can steal a little bit of this

and bring it over to this one ideally because these are upside down fires if I've done this right I shouldn't have to be messing around with blowing on these or anything like this they should just go so I'm going to step back and we'll see how they work you

the benefit of these fires is that because it's ready made you can pull it out from wherever you're storing it you can set it again because it's upside down fire then you can go about chopping up whatever you're going to put into your stew or whatever else you need to do and you don't even have to worry about your fire because it is conveniently making a nice little bed of coals while you cook or do whatever else you want to do go climb a tree well maybe keep an eye on the fire in addition to being an so convenience these fires really help train us to set good fires that are going to burn well we have to become very aware of our materials and our placement because we're setting something that needs to be moved around we have to try to find that balance that we always have to find when we're setting a fire between being compact and stable and between having enough room in it so that it's oxygenated and it can burn very well you can see the one on the right the white pine I mean that's just lovely firewood anyway but it was really spacious it's burning much faster and brighter less flames the one on the left is packed a little bit tight so you can see more smoke emerging from it and though it's burning very nicely not too much win please though it's birding very nicely it's not quite the beautiful clean burn that I got on the right hand fire

as you can see you've got some nice cool beds here both are really hot you definitely be cooking over these and pretty easy to do come back in a little while and take a final look at how they're doing

so that's the fire Bundle real useful little technique that make life a lot easier in cap thanks for watching as always let me know if you give it a try if you've done this before and love to hear your comments