Campfire Safety Risks; Boot Storage When Bivvying | #AskPaulKirtley 78

Description

Welcome to Episode 78 of #AskPaulKirtley, where I answer questions about about campfire safety risk assessment, use of cottongrass and what to do with your shoes while bivvying...

TIMESTAMPS:

01:10 Campfire safety risk assessment

20:30 Use of cottongrass

29:29 What to do with your shoes while bivvying...

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Video Transcription

in this episode of a spork curtly I'm gonna answer your questions about fire safety risk assessments uses of cotton grass and what to do with your shoes when you're being welcomed welcome to episode 78 of ask Paul curtly where I answer your questions about wilderness bushcraft survival skills and outdoor life now today finds me in East Sussex and I'm coming to the end of a spell of teaching and I'm just taking this opportunity to answer some more of the a sport currently questions and without further ado let's just get straight into them the first one it's still relevant and we've had a bit of rain recently but it's it's a perennial question so it's always going to be relevant there are times when it's more critical than others and I think that's what Duane's getting out this is a question from Dwayne Yates via the speakpipe facility on my blog where you can leave a voicemail around Manchester obviously if you're gonna have a fire hot dry weather you have to do a risk assessment and be careful with it and the question is precisely what do you look for whilst doing that fire risk assessment and has there ever been a time on one of your courses where you've not been able to do fire lighting because it's been on safe take care for catch you soon all right yep good question and I think we always need to ask the question whether it's appropriate to have a fire if we're going to have a fire and there are a number of things that come into that even if we're not in hot dry conditions there are a number of things that come into that

in terms of whether or not it's appropriate to have a fire some of it's an aesthetic thing some of it's about whether or not you want to leave any sign of human activity in an area and a fire is always going to leave some sign even if you do as much as you can to diminish that so that's a that's a question but from a safety perspective in terms of not causing an uncontrolled fire which i think is the core of the question and then there's a number of things you need to look at one is look at what the general risk is is it very dry has there been any rain recently I mean we've had a period recently where I think we had sort of two days of rain in about 80 days in the UK or two days where there was some rain and even when there was some rain there wasn't very much everything was very very dry up until quite recently and then we've had a few days of heavy rain certainly down here and when I was running the intermediate course it was a great week because we had a range of conditions from starting off with very hot very sweaty where people had to really manage their water there to get on top of their water purification the water sterilization and good protocols in their groups and when they were shelter-building and it was hard physical work and then they needed their shelters because it then rained midweek towards the end of the week and the conduct the ground condition has changed massively but even so digging down a little bit that water hasn't penetrated that far yet so it's going to take a fair amount more water to to properly soak the ground but that's kind of anecdotal about here that the general answers to the question is look at what the conditions are and in some parts of the world that you will be told what the fire risk is and I see it as I travel whether I'm in Canada whether I'm in Australia there are markers often set I've seen in Patagonia as well as you go into national parks it says the current fire level risk is at Green it's an Amber it's at red it's a high low moderate however they set it and it's often just something they can set on a color scale with with you know relative words to it and I'll see if I can find a photograph of Wallen and we'll put it up on the screen on there on the video and just as a couple of examples that's something that you need to heed and it may be as it was the case say in Sweden up until recently as it has been in parts of Canada in Ontario in Manitoba for example particularly in some of the parks there's been a total fire ban and so you have to heed that so you have to look at kind of people taking a top-down approach look at what the authorities are telling you about the risk and whether or not you're actually allowed to have a fire given the current conditions that's the first thing and you have to heed that you can't not heed that they're not trying to spoil your fun because they're you know you want to have a fire they're not trying to spoil your fun if it's part of outdoor culture in many parts of the world to use campfires but if the authorities are saying actually it's too risky to have a fire they're not trying to spoil your fun they're trying to benefit nature and that they're trying to benefit people's property they're trying to look after you in the bush if you set a bushfire off and you're in the bush that's not somewhere you want to be either so for all of those reasons you have to heed that that risk and of course in some parts of the world you're not going to be told and so you have to use your judgment and that's kind of part of the problem because a lot of people's judgment it has no experience to back it up in terms of you don't know what's gonna cause a bushfire and what's not going to cause a bushfire so you have to err on the side of caution anyway

in in very dry conditions and then there's a general point if you're up on the moors near Manchester for example to use a specific case that you use why are you having a campfire there anyway there's very little firewood it's mainly Heather I can't really understand in some circumstances why you would want to have a fire it's more appropriate it's more efficient maybe to use a stove and so that's that's a that's a general question just as an aside so let the go back to the kind of way of thinking generally look at what the authorities are telling you look at what the general conditions are if there's no kind of top-down it's okay it's not okay and look at what the conditions are they generally dry do you need to be very careful do you need to be very prudent should you be thinking about maybe just using a stove because it's too difficult to find somewhere that's going to be safe and then you need to look at somewhere look at how you find a safe spot even if the authorities are saying if a park is saying yep it's okay to have a fire at the moment you still need to put it in a sensible place and you know it's not just a case of doing things willy-nilly so are you allowed what are the conditions is it appropriate based on your judgment and even if it is allowed and appropriate then it's a question of where do I place a fire and there are some places you really don't want to place a fire you don't want to put a fire on peaty ground for example because you can set fire to the ground you want to be very careful about having fires on the light soils that you get in Scots pine forests for example and in under spruces where you've got a lot of needles coming down you've got very light soils and if you've ever had a fire on that type of ground you'll know that it burns down into the ground very quickly and also if you've ever done a bushcraft course where you've collected roots from spruces and Pines etc you know that there's a lot of shallow root systems and they're moving around growing out from the base of the trees not that far from the surface so if a fire will burn down into the ground quite readily in that than those lights they're almost not soil it's really just a very light decomposed layer of pine needles in a lot of cases it will go down and then it's going to get into the root systems and those roots can act like little fuses like a cartoon fuse where it burns along and that can pop out in other places it can set fire to the ground in other places so you need to be very careful even if it's quite damp you need to be very careful about having fires that are going to potentially expose shallow root systems to a lot of heat because they can burn along seen it in in Scotland even in damp conditions where you can get quite a lot of heat going along a route so you need to be careful you need to avoid those sorts of situations and I would generally be looking say to avoid PT ground and go down onto a next to a stream for example on a on a pebbly beach on the edge of a stream and have a fire there if I had to have a fire because then there's no chance that I'm going to burn into the ground and it's right next to the water and at some point the water's going to rise and wash away any little bits of charcoal and whatnot that are left there but more importantly the immediate point is that I am NOT going to set fire to the ground and that's it that's a primary concern so you know vamper ground is fine but even leaf litter so for here here for example it's quite heavy clay soil you're not going to set fire to the ground here you you still need to be careful with roots in some places but the it's very heavy clay soil it holds a lot of moisture for a long time but the leaf litter on the top even though a leaf litter is not a good tinder a lot of people try and use it for fire lighting it's pretty crappy but it's good at smouldering and what will happen is in very dry conditions if you don't move all the leaf litter away from where you're having a fire you will get a ring of scorch around the fire the leaf litter immediately there will eventually burn because of the heat of the fire you'll get a scorched ring and that can potentially just get a life of its own and start moving outwards smouldering in an ever-increasing circle around the fire or it can just take off in one direction and then eventually it's going to hit something that isn't just going to smolder that it's going to burst into flames it could be some Bracken it could be some dry sticks you know so so something that you would use for kindling some branches that have come down there are in prime condition to burn it's going to hit something that's going to set fire and then you've got a forest fire on your hands so and you need to remove the leaf litter that's something we all always do and when you're going to set a fire even somewhere like here you're gonna move the leaf litter well away from where you're going to have the fire you're gonna have cold damp ground and then you're going to put your platform on it so that the fire is able to be protected from the cold and the damp and and you're gonna light your fire small sticks feather sticks will have you on top of that and then you're isolating out this the surrounding environment from that heat and that's something you should always do again what you want to do is look you don't want any overhanging trees that you're going to damage you don't want root systems if you scrape away the leaf litter and there are roots going through where you're going to have your fire you need to go somewhere else and because if nothing else you're going to hurt the tree particularly if it's a significant root so there are there are ways that you can immediately just always things that you should do to make sure that the fire doesn't spread into the environment then you've got an issue of maybe sparks bits of litter bits of material going on a convection current and landing somewhere else and then setting fire to tend to dry conditions that's often why there'll be a fire band because even a slight spark is going to set fire to things and but you've got to take responsibility even if you're not told or you're not told one where the other about fire risk you have to make a decision about if I dropped a small flame in this undergrowth here in this Heather in this Bracken in this grass would it just go up if the answer is yes you shouldn't be having a fire anywhere near it because all you need is one spark to go into there and off it goes so you've got to assess that yourself and then when you do decide to have a fire don't put it anywhere where the ground can can set fire you don't know be next to lots of dry vegetation and dry Bracken dry Heather all those things can easily go up and they will spread very very quickly if they're if they're dry enough to burn and you don't want overhanging trees and you don't want a vegetation you're going to damage regardless of whether or not you going to set fire to it you don't want roots under the fire you don't want to be on light pine needle Leia's particularly when it's super dry all of those things should be avoided so you know sometimes you will be better off using a stove you might be better off using something with a with a with a metal plate underneath it if you're going to burn but you still got the issue of bits going down so sometimes you shouldn't have a fire it isn't just a case of like doing a risk assessment and finding the best places sometimes the answer is actually it's not safe to have a fire here we shouldn't have a fire here we should use a stove and even having fires on rocks if the issue is that the undergrowth and everything is so tinder dry again sparks bits of burning paper going into the undergrowth it's going to set a bushfire off potentially even you might not realize it might just set something smoldering you go on your way and then it becomes something bigger later on so all of those things you need to look at it isn't just a case of making sure you've done all the right things so that you can have a fire sometimes the answer is actually everything's too dry there is no suitable place to have a fire I should not have a fire because I'm just going to damage the environment I'm going to put myself and other people and wildlife at risk on to the question of have I ever not be able to have fires on courses and no I live in the UK it's damp it's humid and it's even with a really dry weather recently we've been able to have fires on courses we've had to be careful of all going through all the things I've talked about about where to have fires fires to be fires small in some cases fires monitored always but we've had to take into consideration all other things we've talked about type of soil there are some parts of the forest that we use and where we run courses where it is very light soil with with with pine needles and spruce needles etc and one of the things that we have access to is plenty of water and that's another consideration that you should you have whenever you light a fire it's how do I tidy up here how do I make sure I leave this safe even away from particularly hot conditions I want to leave the the ground cold because I know that there's absolutely no way that there's a fire going to spread from that so I need to put enough water in there to make sure everything's extinguished and I need to make sure it's cold and out so before you even set a fire you should be thinking how am I going to put this right when I finished how am I going to make sure this is safe how am I going to make sure I can get enough water in here and again going back to the mores examples there are a lot of places in upland britain where i just wouldn't have a fire even if i had the fuel because you know I've maybe hiked up there and I've got a few liters of water enough for drinking enough maybe to make a brew and and some instant porridge or something in the morning before dropping down again I've got no water for m4 for damping fires out and it's just not appropriate so you have to think about where am I going to get the water from as well at any time of year not just when it's dry that's part of your your kind of planning and your camp craft and your camp management so yeah we make sure that the fires are dead and out before we before we finished and we make sure that the students understand that that's appropriate and have we ever not been able to have fires on trips no we haven't

we tend to do our Canadian trips in September and if there's been a fire ban in July or August they tend to have been lifted by September so we've not been caught by that other trips that we do in the UK it's not been an issue that October on the Spay for example and so no we've never had an issue with the frontier trips about our course is not being able to have a fire have I been very selective

about where we've had fires yeah absolutely based on all of those sorts of things that we've talked about I've done personal trips however where I haven't been able to have a fire and because it's not being appropriate and so I've done hiking trips in Scotland and April we're going to going to the toilet you know going to the latrine burning toilet paper is sometimes the best way of dealing with it but I've even trips in April sometimes when I remember one hike in the Cairngorms many years ago we'd had a very dry late winter and early spring even at that point the the bracken the heather was very very dry and it wouldn't have been appropriate even to burn the toilet paper after digging a hole and going going to the toilet because if that had gone into the heather it would have been away and so that that's an issue and in that in that case you need a plastic bag you need to carry it and you need to you need to pack it out as unsavory as that seems you don't want to be setting the hillside on fire and trip to new trips in Canada there's been times when it hasn't been appropriate to have personal canoe trips so in the summer it's been there's been times when it has been appropriate to have a fire and I've been in Australia at times sometimes when it hasn't been appropriate to have a fire and so yeah personally I've been in situations where it's not been appropriate to have a fire but in terms of our courses no it's never been an issue to answer that specific question but you have to use your judgement you have to follow what the authorities say and you have to be extremely careful it isn't a right to have a fire wherever you want whenever you want and and doing even the best risk assessment in the world isn't a justification for doing that you have to use good judgment and sometimes the answer's no I shouldn't have it and I think in a lot of places recently around the northern hemisphere the answers been no you shouldn't have a fire

long answer but it's an important one okay this one is from Instagram from Tony Indy Bush as a picture of a field of white fluffy seed heads and the question is hi Paul is there anything you can do with cotton there is one obvious answer but I think you need a mill for that keep up the good work Tony um well Tony what you're looking at there because I asked where it was and you said it was near Doncaster South Yorkshire and what you're looking at there is some sort of some species of cotton grass and possibly hares tail cotton grass is one that grows in that part of the world more generally you're gonna have what people often just call cotton grass or bog cotton and just looking at the photo it's it's not high enough rose for me to see exactly but um it's not a cotton as such so so cotton as in what's woven into cotton garments is in if I remember rightly it's in the MAL vaishu the mallow family if I'm correct and cotton grasses are in the sedge is in the sedge family they're in the genus area forum and so you can't we even if you've got a mill don't go and invest in one Tony because you're not going to be able to use it for making garments because it's not the same stuff these cotton grasses though if you wanted to use them for a bushcraft purpose fluffy downy seed heads are often good at accepting a spark and flaring up quite readily as part of a tinder if you like in terms of catching a spark they often don't burn very long and so you'll need something else to catch that flame they're good for turning a spark into a flame but that flame often doesn't last very long like cotton wool you know if you tease out a small amount of cotton wool and drop a spark into it it's gonna go and then it's gone but if you've got something else to catch the flame could be some Bracken fronds or something then it's a way as a fire and so that's a use for the cot that's the main use for the cotton grass I would say from a bushcraft perspective you could collect a bit of it make sure it's dry and then tease it out and drop a spark and see if that works from it from your Ferro rod and in my experience it does is like thistledown and cattail seed heads etc etc those downy seed heads are good at catching a spark question by Twitter from I've had questions from you before and I can never remember Neven xxx there's probably a more it could be Nev inks double X I think I've had this conversation with myself before I never know how to pronounce it I'm gonna go Neven xxx why not it's my show okay so the question is when you bivy what do you do with your shoes to protect them from creepy crawlies and wetness when I hammock I tend to hang shoes from the side but it's all a bit lopsided am i being a worse um so I'm assuming the question is a serious one in the center you know I know you said I'm a being and what's at the end okay well you don't want water in your shoes overnight because damp damp insides of boots are never fun so you don't want rain going in you don't want water running off your you know slowing off your tarp and dripping and you dripping in your boots so you want to make sure they're inside the shadow of the top I just tend to stand them next to my bivi bag frankly because if I need to get up in the middle of the night and or if I need to get up in a hurry or whatever you know if there's a bleed if I'm working as a problem in the night I just want to be able to put my boots on so I just tend to have a big enough tarp and I have the next to my bivvy if you're in a hammock you can do things where you're hanging things underneath your hammock I know some people do that and like it like it almost like a hammock shelf underneath you could put them directly you can put them on the grounds directly underneath your hammock I'm assuming that your tarp is providing enough shelter for you in the in the hammock putting your boots directly underneath you wouldn't be a problem I can't I can't see if you're worried about creepy crawlies in the UK there's no issues with anything and you might get slugs and or a beetle or something in there but literally just like anyway I just turn them upside down and and shake them out the other thing you can do if you're worried about water getting in and I know some people who do this if you're using quite a small tarp and you know there isn't a lot of shadow other than where you're sleeping and there's a risk that maybe there's a little side wind and you get some drips into your boots simple solution to that is take a couple of sticks put them in the ground turn your boots upside down and then put them on the sticks so like like a like a tent peg type stick knock it into the ground put your boot on it upside down and I don't tend to do that a lot of times unless I am in a tiny tarp and I really don't have space under the tarp for the boots because they don't air off as well overnight I like what

like to do with my boots overnight particularly if I'm wearing them day in day out is I like to pull the insoles out and just place them in so I opened the tongues out take the insoles out place them upright so they've they've got more chance to air off and I've experimented with this like leaving one in and one out and the one out that's upright inside they're the kind of chimney of the boot is it where it always dries much more than the one that's just left inside so I like to dry the insole I like to leave it open so it dries out but clearly you need enough space so that you're not going to get water in you wouldn't want it soft outside your top or right on the edge of the top where drips are going to go in and other than that I don't think there's a major there's a major issue and you should always check that there's not something in your you know I know even though we're in the in Britain and Ireland we are in a place where there's no sort of nasties there's no nasty spiders there's no nasty snakes scorpions centipedes etc etc I still don't want to put my foot into a slug for example and squish it because they stink when they when they're kind of decomposing and I got one squashed inside a bivy bag once and it stank until I until I would manage to wash the bivi bag in the in the sleeping bag you don't want that in your shoes either frankly so um always check that you know give him a shake make sure there's nothing in there it's just a good practice for wherever you are regardless of whether or not there's something that might be in there that would give you a venomous bite for example so you're not being a worse you don't want wet boots you don't want slugs and things in there and and you don't and further afield you don't want venomous insects in there and they often do like hiding in those dark places so that's that's what I would do I mean the other thing you could do if you really wanted them up off the ground you didn't want to put them under your hammock is if you've got a hanging line central hanging line under your tarp hang them off that further down the line whether out of your way and but still under the tar that's another thing that you could do and that's it that brings us to the end of this episode of ask Paul curtly thank you for the questions hopefully the answers were useful to you and I look forward to receiving more questions remember you can ask questions via twitter using the hashtag ask for curtly you can make a public post on instagram video post or photo post with the hashtag a sport curtly because i'll find them that way you can send me an e-mail find my blog and you can use the speakpipe and I think the speak pipes are good one and might encourage people to use a speak pipe because it's a good audio audible way of people asking a question if you've just got a question that's a good way if you've got something you like the cotton grass we want to show Instagram is great for that helicopter going over so that brings us to the end um please like subscribe share if you've enjoyed this

subscribe to my blog if you're on my blog subscribe if you listen to this as a podcast please subscribe to this as a podcast on your favorite podcast platform and then you're not going to miss the next episode had an Apache come over last week pretty low when we were when we were working in the woods but I don't think that is that's not how it doesn't sound heavy enough so yeah that's that's me end of a spell outdoors glad to have a bit of a break in the hot weather frankly it was getting very hot and humid very tropical almost we've had a few days of heavy rain it's been quite nice the last few days bit more of a breeze but cooler it's all good starting to feel a little or terminal had a few brown leaves dropping around me today some of the birches are looking a little bit yellow and brown around the edges and some of the sweet chestnuts here are quite well formed not a great year for berry so far great blackberries people that people are saying there's not a lot of black bees around I would beg to differ I think there are quite a lot black bees around and the ones that we found have been very delicious very tasty juicy sweet and and good but other berries not so much of a sign of Hawthorne's are not ripe yet and they're really quite far back in in my mind and there's some good beech nuts around there's some good chestnuts around and I think we might be in for a good good autumn with the nuts and I think I think we'll go very quickly to autumn I think it's with the weather the way it's been I'm hoping that now we've had a bit more moisture and maybe it's cooling down overnight a bit we might get some fungi last August here was absolutely spectacular we had loads of boletus we had loads of lek seinem we had chanterelles we had all sorts and going off in the woods last August I've seen nothing here this year absolutely nothing we had some chicken of the woods last week and and that's about it that's all the wild fungi that I've had recently so I'm hoping the fungi improves be interested to see what you're seeing around you can let me know in the comments below this if you got no comments on the other things and always happy to hear from people you if I don't reply I do read the comments both on my blog and on youtube so it's always good to hear from you appreciate you getting involved and I look forward to speaking to your next episode of a sport curtly take care Cheers

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