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Sunday, October 30, 2005

Burn Baby Burn! - Guerilla Camping 101.5

Draft originally posted at The Guerrilla News Network. Included here with GNN commentary courtesy of the GNN Archive.
R93390
4 years ago
sisyphus

Another great entry, I have nothing to add except what your title referenced:
To Build a Fire – Jack London
Sometimes fiction drives a point home better than anything.

R93422
4 years ago
silverback

another great chapter

R93427
4 years ago
Snark

As usual, a fantastic blog….can’t tell you how much I enjoy these. Well-written, entertaining, and insanely useful.
I wanted to comment specifically on your practices of minimizing the impact your fire has on the forest floor. I can’t tell you how glad it makes me that you included that. The forest floor is absolutely loaded with bacteria, fungi, and other decomposers that are absolutely essential to the functioning of the ecosystem- they break down leaf litter and return the nutrients to the soil and the plants. Carefully clearing your fire ring and later replacing the layers of humus-rich soil you displace is a really important thing to do from an ecological standpoint. Likewise, the huge, hot, smoky campfire does indeed totally sterilize the soil underneath it to a depth of at least a foot. If you’re making one in an established campground, the fire rings there are basically sacrifice zones, but making one on virgin ground is a bad idea. A small fire minimizes the damage.

R93449
4 years ago
redoubt

Bump….....

R93450
4 years ago
BlackPacker

Not only does fire sterlize, that humus and duff, once dried by the fire above it becomes flamable. I have seen fires spread underground, requiring lots of digging (and thus trashing) of the forest floor. Honestly, a cook fire is best made inside a hobo stove, but until I get some way to put photos and illustrations in here, I’m skipping stoves and how to string up a tarp.

R93822
4 years ago
hagcel

Another great way to start a fire:
Fuck tinder. Take about three feet of toilet paper and wrap it around your hand. Hold the top in about hal way, then flip it over on your hand and fold the bottom in about half way, making a donut. Set under kindling, ignite and get warm. And if you don’t carry toilet paper, you’re a savage, you can probably start fires with a hard gaze.

R94272
4 years ago
nada

Fun ways to start fire: Magnifying glass and cotton ball, Hemp rope and flint/tinder, and my favorite Steel wool and a 9volt battery.
Not for conservationists:
Fill a coffee can with gasoline get a buncha styrofoam and drop it in the can. Watch as it melts, fill with styrofoam until it reaches its solubility point.
You now have a coffee can full of napalm.

R94279
4 years ago
ZenSwashbuckler

And if you don’t carry toilet paper, you’re a savage, you can probably start fires with a hard gaze.
That stuff just doesn’t decompose, man. Sits there for years (or months, maybe… I do know it is unpleasant to find a lump of the stuff laying there, grinning smugly up at you, under the rock you just picked up for the same purpose). Unless you’re in an all-evergreen forest, you can find some nice big leaves to wipe your ass with, perfectly good. Smooth stones also do the trick, but their fixed shape means you’ll want to finish up with something that can bend to your peculiar form, just to get everything.
Unfortunately I haven’t yet mastered the evil eye thing.

R94348
4 years ago
hagcel

Thats why you burn it or pack it out. I should have mentioned above that uded toilet paper works even better, but wait a few minutes before cooking on it.
lol…
Tha magnifying glass thing is fun. I use a lensatic marching compas and can start fires with the lens on that. The most fun is the bow drill. Especially if you are bored at a camp site and make one using chipped rocks and foraged cordage.

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