Campfires On Rock, Group Morale, Dangers of Woodsmoke | #AskPauKirtley 62

Description

Welcome to Episode 62 of #AskPaulKirtley, where I answer questions about whether or not to have campfires on rock, what to do when group morale is low, a magnifying glass for lighting tinders, dangers of exposure to woodsmoke and the differences between traditional Scouting and modern bushcraft.

TIMESTAMPS:

02:19 Fires on rock?

11:42 What to do when group morale is low?

20:37 A magnifying glass for lighting tinders

23:49 Dangers of exposure to woodsmoke

29:31 The differences between traditional Scouting and modern bushcraft

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Tags: bushcraft,survival,wilderness,camping,hiking,outdoors,question and answer,advice,questions,answers,bushcrafting,nature,self reliance,self sufficiency,outdoor skills,outdoor knowledge,Paul Kirtley,askpaulkirtley

Video Transcription

in this episode of a sport curtly we are going to be talking about fires on a rock what to do when group morale gets low magnifying glasses for lighting Tinder's dangers of exposure to wood smoke and the differences between traditional scouting and modern bushcraft

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welcome welcome to episode 62 of asked Paul curtly and I am in the Kangol National Park in Scotland where I'm here for a few days to do some hiking I had hoped to be up a bit higher today but it's been quite windy yesterday was horrendously windy it's a bit less windy today and it's supposed to be less so tomorrow so hopefully I'll be a on the tops tomorrow but today I'm more down in the Glen's and in the woods and it's beautiful I'm not complaining at all and it's been a sunny morning it's coming up lunch time and I thought I would stop and record an episode of ask Paul currently when he got my little compact camera with me today and so if there's any jumps in continuty and it's simply because this little camera doesn't record for much longer than about 12 minutes before it decides it wants to stop and the battery doesn't last very long hi there so if it seems a little bit more raggedy than normal if you're watching that's why but hopefully you bear with it the sun's out at the moment but I can see this in cloud coming in as well so the rain that's forecast for later this afternoon does look like it's coming in so that's why I'm stopping now to do it rather than my usual sort of towards the end of the day and also if you're watching the sun's probably going to be on and off my face but my face isn't the important thing it's what comes out of my mouth that's more important and that's what you're here to listen to and so without further ado let's get on with the questions so the first question is about fires on rock and this is from George and he says hi Paul I recently watched both your feather sticks and bow-drill Island videos I noticed that both fires were lit on large pieces of rock I've often seen ground rock or whatever it's called question mark in brackets damaged from campfire with cracks flaking and blackening do you think it's something we should avoid doing or does it not matter it'd be nice to hear your opinion on the matter many thanks George well I think that's a good question and I think anything that we do with fire in the outdoors is going to leave some sort of impact whether it's we're just burning fuel which could be used by nature for something else whether it's nutrients whether its food for grubs and beetles and home for insects and therefore food for birds and all of these things we do need to consider and also the effect that we have on the ground and as much as we try and leave as little trace as possible of our fires both in terms of environmental impact but also aesthetic impact because we don't want to go into the wild and it looked like there's been five million camp fires there and it's being trashed and used by lots of people even in places that are relatively well used we want to go and you know one of the attractions is to go and feel like we're you know even if it's a little bit of suspension of disbelief feel like we could be the first people in that place or it definitely has a wild feel to it so there are many reasons why we need to be careful with fires and obviously I can't do a complete treatise on that here but I think we all know that and I think but you watching this or listening to this know that that we have a responsibility those of us that have a campfire and whether it's over night or whether we stay for longer and we have a responsibility to be considerate and thoughtful in our use of that particularly in this day and age when there are an increasingly large number of people going out into the wild and then there's a whole Leave No Trace movement and I have some issues with some of the things that they teach and I'm not going to get into that right now because there are there are in short and it's not just leaving a trace and I've talked about that before in the past as well and there are environmental impacts to anything that we do with our leisure time whether it's we're going into an area using resources there or whether we're taking me sources into an area and using those resources because they've been extracted from the ground manufactured you've carried them in you might have transported them there you've driven there you've transported that equipment there you're using petrol chemical fuels perhaps rather than having a fire but there's an environmental impact to all of these things and I've talked about that in previous a sport Curly's and I'm not going to talk about it at length again today because that's not the question the question is about fires on rock and there are a couple of videos that George is referring to which are part of my online elementary wilderness bushcraft course and there's a couple of videos that are floating around they're out on the internet that I put out for free to give a people give people a taster of them of the quality of the of the videos and lessons in that course as well as just to share them for said they're nice videos both of those videos were filmed in Canada the ones that you're referring to the course as a whole and the content was created in the UK in so everywhere from the South of England up to not far from here in Scotland actually in Sweden and in Canada and it is very much meant to be a broad base of skills that apply in the northern temperate and the boreal in particular although the the application of those skills is much broader than the area that it's filmed and but I just wanted to give a taste of how widely applicable a lot of those skills are so yeah the feather sticks and the bow drill and videos that you're referring to were filmed in Canada there were other fire lighting bits that were filmed in other parts of the world but those two were filmed in an area that is the Canadian Shield which is a large area of really ancient bedrock which is close to the surface and anybody that's canoed in that classic canoe country and knows what that's like is very thin topsoil in most places and it was scoured by glaciers in the last ice age and those grooves and channels that are full of water and they're fantastic to canoe or a partly a result of that and then of course you're caught and the the rivers and lakes and it's just a fantastic

environment that the canoe is completely a home in and where we filmed was in a really good canoe area and we filmed on areas that are accepted campsites camping areas on those routes and what you'll find on a lot of canoe routes in Canada is that there's a little Enclave that's sort of carved out of the bush or it might be on a on a promontory with it gets a bit of a breeze so that the insects aren't too bad but there's a reason why the campsites there and you typically camp on those campsites and they're not they're not big sites they're typically often in the provincial parks they have a restriction of nine people maximum on those sites and even so you'd struggle to get that many people and there with tarps and tents some of them are that small and there's normally an area where they want you to have a fire or a fire has traditionally been set and there are a few reasons for that one is you don't want lots of different scars and marks and therefore where that fire area has been is where people typically have the fire and that's the best thing to do so you concentrate any damage in any coal and any charcoal and etc in one place equally they don't want you in a parks in general and also just common sense says that don't put your fire in the woods whether you've got a very thin loamy soil and there's easily inflammable particularly when it's dry because it's largely made up of pine needles and another light detritus like that it's not a heavy clay soil it's not wet and it has roots of coniferous trees in there things like white pine and Jack pine and black spruce and those native North American and conifers and they've all got shallow root systems as do the native conifers here I'm surrounded by Scots pine here it's relatively easy to set fire to their root system so you don't want to be having fires on the earth either where that's possible so rock is the best option in that circumstance and having the fire on the rock where people have had those fires for generations

is what I do when I'm there and that's exactly what I was doing in those videos so there it makes complete sense is part of the tradition is part of the accepted practice it's the least worst place to have them in terms of wider potential damage to the environment and that's why when in Rome I was doing exactly what's considered to be the best practice in that environment other parts of the world going out onto a an isolated outcrop of rock in this part of the world and having a fire on it probably isn't the best thing to do and there are other options here but in that environment that was the best option which is why that was shown that way but it's a good question and it's very very difficult to cover all eventualities in a video or even in a sport curtly and not leave some potential option for one environment out that's why you need to think carefully you need to research you need to look into what people do what's acceptable what's the best practice in an area I could clearly give longer answers to some of these questions but then people say well these these sessions these a sportcoat sessions are too long your videos are too long and that's the difficulty we have these days of making something which is engaging that people are going to watch that people are going to want to watch from beginning to end and put enough information in there that they can go away and be responsible in applying the skills and for anybody any of us that make videos whether it's a professional instructor or an amateur that's putting out and documentation of their adventures on YouTube I think we all bear a responsibility to make sure that we're putting that side of the things that side of things forwards as well at the best we can so hopefully that answers the question George and any more follow-up questions to that or comments you know where to get me four questions send me an email or any of the other methods Twitter Instagram hashtag a sport curtly or if you've got comments on my answer go to Paul curtly Cote UK find episode 62 of a sport curtly and leave a comment under the episode on my blog love to hear your thoughts on that all right next question this is from Danny Barrett and it's via email and his question is hi Paul I've got a bit of a psychology question for you I'd like to know when you find morale is low in a group that you are with how do you keep yourself from being sucked in and affected also do you have a mantra that you keep that used to keep positive mental attitude when the chips are down I'd love to hear your thoughts on this subject keep up the great work you're doing

and I'll see you next year for another frontier bushcraft yeah good question and again a broad one and a big one and I probably won't touch on every possibility and every eventualities in this answer but just a couple of thoughts to throw out there I'd say one thing is it depends whether it's a group that I'm with so a group of peers or whether it's a group that I'm leading and I there's a definite distinction there although experienced with one clearly overlaps and informs the other and can benefit how you deal with it in any situation but yeah I think if you jump back to why morale tends to get low on trips you can start to maybe head some of those things off at the pass before you even start particularly if you're in a leadership position you can think about what's going to be difficult about the trip and actually have good daily briefings certainly but even a trip briefing before you say often like this is going to be the tough bit guys this you know get the map out you know pour over it in a you know in a nice warm environment when you're not stressed a cup of coffee or a glass of wine or whatever the situation is where you're kind of briefing the team before you even set off it might be even before you've left the country for another country okay this is the route that we're planning to take these are going to be the tough bits it's rough terrain it's steep woogie's exposed

tough whitewater that we're going to have to negotiate long portage whatever it is that's going to be tough and you should be thinking about that as a leader certainly and even if you're planning a trip with your mates you know you want to be thinking about that too which are going to be the tough bits of this which which where are the potential problems going to be all of that should be in your planning and then you can be honest with people and say these guys and girls this is going to be the tough this is there's gonna be the tough bit this is what I expect to be tough here here and here and then people have already got that in their mind that without overblowing it and making people fearful of it clearly but they've got like okay that's that that day is coming up in two days time that's the day Paul said was going to be tough we've got that big climb to do we've got that big potage to do we've got that long day along that lake that we've got to we've got to cover to get to the next campsite whatever it is and then that then sets the expectations I think morale often gets low because expectations are mismatched with what the experiences and that's part of it I think the other thing as well is just the physicality of doing a trip whether you're hiking whether you're canoeing whether you're snowshoeing whether you're cross-country skiing and there's a physicality to it which if people are not used to it or even if they've done it before but they've not done it for a while and they've just sort of forgotten we're very good at remembering the good parts of trips and forgetting the shitty bits or trips and you do get sore feet or sore knees or sore back or arms or depending on what you're doing and things

ache muscles hurt you know I've been hiking up here for a few days and I've not done I did a bit hiking in Australia over and Christmas and New Year but I've not done a lot of hiking in Scotland when was the last time I did any walking in Scotland October and that was only a couple of day walks interspersed with other things mainly canoeing and so I've not been out hiking days over rough terrain for quite some time and I tell you this morning I felt it after the long walk that I did yesterday but then you get into it your muscles loosen up and it's just it's just knowing that that's normal that yeah you're gonna feel a bit sore and tired particularly the beginning of a trip you think about longer trips you're gonna have the most weight that you're gonna have at the beginning of the trip because you're carrying your own you're carrying food you might be carrying fuel you've got the most weight at the beginning and you're also as prepared as you might be for the trip you're gonna get into the rhythm physically and mentally as you go and it will get easier from that respect even if you get tired and a bit fatigued the pack weights going to go down because you're going to eat it whether it's a Portage Park or a backpack whatever you're doing hiking canoeing skiing and that gets easier you get into the rhythm of it the other thing that of course can affect morale on the trip is just a clash of personalities people can just be like ah I just don't want to be here anymore with these people they're pissing me off that person's irritating me they've got this bad habit they keep telling bad jokes they won't shut up and I want to watch the wildlife or whatever it is but again that's about group management that's about saying okay you know this section we're going to be quiet because we're going to look for wildlife or you know when were in camp can we all get some firewood first please before we go off and set our own personal camps up so that whoever's ready to light the fire first has got everything they need there and I'm not having to run around doing all themselves feeling like they're the one that's doing all the work and making sure things like washing up cleaning up packing things away at the end of the day is either divvied out or the jobs as a whole you know somebody does the cooking somebody does the washing up all those things just avoiding that resentment that's good and then whether of course that's another factor that can really affect some people that if you're sort of biting into nasty conditions every day headlong into you know persistent rain or strong winds or ever yeah that that's about what's going on up there

much as anything you need the mental fortitude and again you want to be encouraging you want to try and let people understand that we're all in this together that it's tough for everyone and sometimes it's just a case of sitting down and talking to people and talking through it and just being a logical foil for them or allowing them just to talk and they could have things on their minds and all of those things help but yeah it's often when people come up against unexpected physical difficulties or mental difficulties that the morale starts to dive and nothing if you can forestall some of that by heading it off for the past and expecting certain places where it's going to happen observing how people are interacting together and making sure that you make any adjustments that you need to make they're either directly or indirectly there are some subtle things that you can do people don't even realize what you're doing to just avoid tensions that are starting to build up or sometimes you have to say to people come on guys we just have to crack on here we have to just get stuck in and get on with that we're all in this together let's get going come on we signed up for this would you rather be here or a desk or give people a bit of perspective sometimes as well helps go yeah fair enough I'd rather be here in the pouring rain looking at this wonderful landscape than in a boring meeting of work or whatever it is sometimes it's just a bit of perspective that needs needs is required to jolt people out of it so yeah some thoughts there and the other thing I would say about that just as well there is it it's not all just about other people or the leader on the course to keep morale low it's also kind of an individual responsibility to have a bit of a word with yourself sometimes and go I'm just being a misery here I'm just being grumpy because my blood Sugar's low and I'm tired yes but this is actually what I wanted to be doing you know having a bit of a word with yourself and having that self-talk as well to pause yourself up as well as important and encouraging other people to do that you know a lot of people how different levels of self talk and self motivation and dialogues that go on in their own heads and I think just encouraging people to have the right sort as well is good alright this is a question from Sean I think I've answered a similar question to this before Sean about magnifying glasses for lighting Tinder's but this is a voicemail from lasts a latter end of last year so instead of trying to focus a point from from a distance thanks very much Cheers all right I have answered a very similar question to that before Sean I can't remember which episode it was in I'm afraid to say but yet in terms of general points about magnifying glasses clearly the bigger the area of glass that you've got the more light there's incident on it the more energy is going to be focused into the focal point of that lens so that's that's one thing the magnification of lens has an impact also the quality of the glass light transmission how much light energy gets through the glass in terms of the heat energy the Sun it's not too much of a an issue as long as you're not using the old bottom of a milk bottle when they used to be milk bottles that you found in the woods that scratched and very opaque you know as long as you're using a half-decent bit of glass that you can see through it's going to be fine in terms of light transmission yeah a focal length of different lenses is different and one one that I found quite good for carrying is you can get not the tiny tiny little jeweler's loupe stir in a little silver stainless steel cases or chromed cases not those loops but you can get a bigger one it's not really a jeweler's loupe it's a folding magnifying lens I like it because it has like a black plastic case and with a pivot and the lens Pitons swings around out of it so it sits in an inner pocket and it's not particularly big and it's quite useful for sort of looking at insects and details on on trees and plants when you're identifying birds and looking details of flowers and anything you want to have a close look at so they're often something you might carry with you and I find those particularly good I will try and I know I bought it off Amazon and I really like it I will try and find it on Amazon and I will put a link to it in the show notes and I either notes below this video on my blog as poor curly 62 okay and but I like that one a lot it will light tinder and it's useful for a lot of other things as well and it folds down small and go in a pocket it will go in a survival kit if you wanted it to okay so good question from Sean there it's question from David Bailey that's come via email as well this is about the dangers of wood smoke I really appreciate the quality of all your online advice I wondered if there was any research about potential health risks of being exposed to regular water-based fires thanks again David or in short without being able to recall the details the explicit details i talked my head yes there is and in particular people who use fires a lot on a day to day patient basis for people living in africa who might be in enclosed spaces and there was definitely a move to and it still is by some NGOs to move people away from using wood fires in enclosed spaces particularly in huts if you've ever been in a Masai hut for example the whole inside of the hut is entirely blackened with smoke from cooking and some of that is some of that smoky interior is there to discourage insects from coming in as well of course in some of those places but I remember but in terms of wood fire cooking on a day-to-day basis

there was definitely a correlation between that and respiratory problems potential carcinogenic effects of wood smoke in an enclosed environment environment like that and and I know there's been some research done on that and there are some statistics on that and some of these wood-burning stoves that you can get that also have a USB charging point on them not the little ones that you can buy in outdoor stores in the UK and in Europe and other places and where they're distributed with the larger ones that were designed for use in those places in Africa that's exactly why they were made they would burn fuel more cleanly and there would be a an electricity generation for charging mobile phones because one of the interesting things about a lot of places in Africa that don't have mains electricity is that they've actually got decent mobile phone coverage but people have got no means of charging their phones and so that was a solution to two problems that they were facing in the communities there and I will see if I can dig out any of the research that I've seen in passing and I will put a link in the show notes to at least one piece of research or maybe something that can allow you to dive into that in more detail should you wish and I guess the reason you're asking the question is because as bushcraft people is outdoors people who like campfires the first question about fires on rock being a case in point is that we do need to be concerned about how much smoke we breathe in and I'm very much concerned about how much smoke I breathe in I don't like being in enclosed spaces with lots of smoke in those of you that have done courses with me and we're sitting under the parachute and there's wet wood going on the fire and it's causing a huge amount smoke you know how irritated I get with that and I will encourage people to get rid of that and go and find some decent firewood dead standing dry material or stuff that we've that's been seasoned and then we split out get that on the fire you've got a nice clean flame even if it's a relatively small fire minimal smoke even in something that's open sided you can have quite a lot of smoke billowing off and down around same with tarps and you know it's good to have the open sides but you want a relatively clean fire going underneath as well you don't want a horrible smoky fire and nobody wants to sit in there and horrible smoky fire and then particularly if you're in enclosed spaces if you're in shelters that have in a natural shelter that benefits from a fire or even something like a traditionally traditional style tepee tarp tepee or lava or cut or whatever it is that you're staying and you know traditionally there's a fireplace in the middle to be fire you'd be smoking your meats up at the top what people would be lying down on the ground because the smoke comes down you don't be sitting up in the smoke you'd have to be lying down so that you were below that with the worst of the smoke and it's always been a consideration it's always been a concern and you also want to think about what you're burning on your fire is that that would be a big thing I don't like people burning plastic on fires when we're camping when we're sitting around the fire even in the open because you only need a slight breeze coming towards you getting all of that nasty carcinogenic smoke going into your lungs that's not a good thing there are situations where we burn rubbish on trips so for example when we're on some canoe trips particularly in bear country and we've got food you know might have had vacuum-packed meat or something for example we're going to burn that stuff but we burn it at the end of the day and we make sure there's enough heat and the fire that it burns off quickly and there's burn entirely and we don't do it when everybody's sitting around trying to relax we certainly don't burn rubbish when we're cooking and that again that's something I if you've been in camp with me you know that I'm pretty vehement about don't burn paper because you get ashen food and plastic that puts cigarette but all that stuff that's going to give off either nasty residues onto food or smoke into people's faces when they're trying to cook or ash that's going to go into things that is not pleasant don't do that save it for later burn it off later if you're going to burn it off so some some words of advice there last question and the Sun has gone in now the Sun has gone in but the lights flatter which is better for the contrast on the video camera differences between traditional scouting and modern bush crafts this is from Nieman via email as well Paul I really enjoy your YouTube broadcasts you have a very down-to-earth way of presenting honest material I was in Boy Scouts in 1960s and we were under canvas and bivouacking with very basic gear we were highly skilled in knife and axe craft by lighting with two matches and cooking on open fires being self-sufficient Leave No Trace had never been coined yet but you could never find our campsite once we left it so my question is I really do not see any difference between what I learned then and the current bushcraft in inverted commas that is currently marketed now please could you explain if there are differences thanks Neiman fundamentally I'd agree with a Newman that there aren't any differences between a lot of what's in traditional camping and wood craft in traditional scouting and what's put under the umbrella of bushcraft today I would recommend having a listen to the podcast interview that I did with Lisa Fenton about the the history of where bushcraft came from because I think you'll see that there's a big overlap and certainly in the context of bushcraft being an expeditionary in nature in terms of it being colonial in nature where a lot of bushcraft came from in terms of those frontier times in terms of people using it for military purposes to allow them to go into areas or to explore for various reasons and where scouting came from if you think about where scouting scouting came from if you think about the the important figures in the history of scouting baden-powell and Russell Burnham those guys were scouts in the military sense and they had frontier experience in North America with Russell Burnham and Africa particularly in the borough war and they brought those principles back and codified it into the beginning of what became the scouting movement so there is massive overlapping where both of those things have come from I think there was a diversion my opinion when I was in scouts in the nineteen Cubs and Scouts in the late 70s and early 80s and there wasn't a huge amount of put crafts and camping and those traditional skills that you would if you open scouting for boys a lot of those traditional skills and there wasn't a huge amount of that taught in my Cub and Scout troops because the people just didn't have the skills and I think there was also a movement away there were lots of badges for things that didn't involve any of their skills you know I had a psychic I remember doing a cycle proficiency badge and a photography badge I still loved photography I you know so I'm not complaining I think one of my interests in photography goes right back to then but I think the pioneering and the wood craft and even those sorts of things actually fell out of favor for quite a while in in scouting and I think it's had a resurgence laterally to an extent and I certainly feel from the number of scout leaders who come on courses with me and who follow my materials online that I am bringing some of that bushcraft back to some of those guys that want to take it to their to their Scout troops as well and so yeah I don't think fundamentally there's a great deal of difference between the skill sets that you're talking about Nieman and the skill sets that we're talking about now and I think the more we can do to share those and cross fertilize and reignite some of those areas the better but go back and have a listen to that podcast I did release it because I think that will answer the question a little bit more detail and I'm hoping to have Lisa back on a new podcast before too long as well there's also a little bit with Lisa on some of those subjects on the camera the episode number but the one where we're at bushcraft festive island in Sweden last year what we were both there as guests and Lisa was doing a talk and wish again covers a lot of what you're asking about

and I was doing some fire lighting workshops and then we also recorded a bit for that multi-part multi person podcast

did including people like Harry Sepp as well it's well worth a listen so I put links to both of those in the notes below this episode of a sport currently so if you find episode 62 of a sport currently on poor curly coat UK the links that I've talked about will be there and I'll link to that main episode with Lisa on the YouTube video at the top of the screen here as well for people on YouTube go and have a listen if you don't subscribe to the paul kelly podcast already please do if you like long-form content if you like listening to detailed informative content and they're mainly conversations that I'm having with other people who are very knowledgeable very experienced experts in their field you will gain a lot from that subscribe via your favorite platform whether that's iTunes Apple podcasting app stitcher and some of the other platforms as well that are all available now just search for the Paul Kirtley podcast on your favorite podcasting platform and you will find it there and you can subscribe and get the benefit of those as well because I take some time to get good guests on there and I take some time to have good quality conversations with them which anybody who's ever done interviews will know that you don't just turn up and do it off the top of your head there's some preparation involved there and I'm that's great for me because I learn things on those podcast as well but I love sharing those as well because you get the benefit so if you're not already a subscriber to the porc early podcast please please subscribe thank you

right that brings us to the end of this episode thank you for listening thank you for your attention I'm going to continue on my walk now as I say it's forecast to rain later on so I'll get as much mileage in as possible also it's it's January when I'm recording this it gets dark quite early so I need to make the most of the day so hopefully that answered some of your questions please keep the questions coming in you know how to send them in if you don't go to my blog find a sport curtly there's a list of ways of sending the questions to me there and I look forward to answering your questions on a future episode of ask Paul curtly and whatever you're doing in the outdoor take care and see you soon [Music]

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