How to Find Fuel for your Campfire

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. One of the greatest impacts a campfire can have on the environment around it is people reusing up the fuel in the area and starting to cut down live trees and things and so I definitely don’t advice that you do that. Stick to deadwood that’s already on the ground, you can find a lot of wood like this that can often be broken up, can be used for a campfire. Look for the stuff that’s dry and can easily be snapped like that, when it’s not so easy to snap it means it may still be green and when it’s too easy to snap it means it may be rotten and there may not be whole lot of fuel value in that wood. You’re really looking for two sizes of wood; you’re looking for kindling, which is the smaller stuff maybe this size and smaller and you’re looking for fuel wood, which is kind of this size and larger. You know you can make a decent campfire with this size wood but that’s going to burn very quickly and it’s going to be fairly hard for the campfire to keep supplied with wood. So you can get a bunch of this stuff, try to grab some bigger stuff, a little bit bigger wood and the real campfire makers specialty is birch bark. Burch bark is nice because it will light a fire when it’s wet and there’s always a layer underneath the birch bark that’s going to stay dry and it has kind of an oil to it that burns very easily. The thing that birch bark is and this is not a white birch but this is more of a silver birch, a black birch, make sure that you’re not peeling it off a live tree, you only take birch bark from dead down birch trees and those are usually pretty easily to find in the northeast forest here. If you’re not in the northeast or maybe some other campfire lighting material that may work better but for around here make sure you’re getting your birch bark only from down birch trees and not peeling live trees cause that’ll kill the tree."