How to Build a Campfire with Fire Rings, Fire Pans & Mound Fires

Video Transcript

" Hi, this is Bruce Lessels from Zoar Outdoor on behalf of expertvillage.com. We’re going to talk about making a campfire and taking down a campfire and campfire safety. So we talked about campfire safety and making sure that your campfire is going to remain contained, it wasn’t going to do any damage to the environment or to the forest and a bunch of different ways to do that. One way is to sort of build the standard campfire ring with rocks but this is only good in areas where there have been campfires made frequently and they’re reusing an old area. When you’re doing this in a new area you’re really going to burn the soil below it and you’re going to create sort of a permanent scar, it’s going to take a long time to go away. You’re also going to burn the rocks a little bit, scar the rocks and the rocks are always going to kind of have that burn look to them. So another way to do that is sort of more low impact way to do a campfire like this is to bring a fire pan and a fire pan can just be a 3 inch high, sort of like a garbage can metal, garbage can lid and what you do with the fire pan is you keep the fire completely contained within the pan. You can set it up on rocks above the ground so it doesn’t scorch the ground underneath it and that’s another good way to prevent damaging the ground from a fire. In a lot of parks out west that’s a requirement, you can’t make a fire without a fire pan. A third way to do is what’s called a mound fire and a mound fire you could put down a tarp or a garbage bag with about 3 to 5 inches of soil on top of it and this should be deep soil from not the layers on top where they’re the organic soil, but the non-organic soil that’s deeper down, you can use a garden trial or something to get that soil out and then you put about 3 to 5 inches of that on top of the plastic and start your fire on top of that mound. Then when you’re done just rebury that soil deep underground and you can pick up the whole thing with the plastic tarp underneath it and you really have a very low impact fire that is not going to be seen and not going to cause either damage to the environment or cause the next person to be impacted by your campfire."