How To Build A One Match Fire
For today’s “Camp Fun At Home” activity, we’re challenging you to start a campfire with just one match!
With your parents’ permission, check out these tips and then test your campfire skills in your fireplace, in a designated spot in the backyard, or in a fire pit. Have fun practicing for cabin overnights and trips!
Today’s challenge: start a fire using just one match!
There are so many ways to build a campfire. Anybody you ask is going to have a different method, whether it’s the log cabin method, lean-to method, teepee method, or any others. There’s so many different ways you can build a fire, but this is one that works for me.
Start with the 4D’s of collecting firewood:
- Down
- Dead and dry
- Dinky
- Distant.
You want anything you collect to put in the fire to be down. You don’t want to be pulling it off the tree.
It also has to be dead, and keep in mind that this is dead / dry, because sometimes things are down and dead, but they’re not dry yet. That could either be because it rained recently and it’s a pretty wet piece of wood, or it could be because a windstorm knocked it down before it was dead.
You want it to be dinky, so don’t just go pulling logs out of the woods. Those will be too big to burn, and it will discrupt the ecosystem if you start removing huge logs and branches that animals, bugs, and smaller plants may be living in and around.
The final tip, distant, means that you want it to be far away from your campsite. You don’t want everything that you gather to be from right around the same radius. It’s good leave-no-trace ethics to spread out the impact you have on your campsite.
More kindling is always better, and I love using dead hemlock twigs. You can always burn smaller things, but it’s impossible to jump up to the bigger wood before your little fire is ready to burn it.
To start building this fire, I just lay four sticks down and inside that square, I’m build a little lean-to. It starts out looking like a log cabin fire, but I really like making lean-to fires, because I feel like when the twigs are kind of propped up against each other, you’re able to have air flow going underneath. To make the kindling, I take the really tiny hemlock twigs and break them up a little bit, so there’s a cluster of them where I’m going to be lighting the fire. These initial twigs are tinier than a match, because they’re going to be the first thing that’s going to burn.
Flames can’t light anything bigger than the fuel source that they’re burning from, so a match isn’t going to be able to light anything bigger than a match, until it lights other little match sized twigs, and then it can grow. You have to start really small and work up from there. It doesn’t have to look pretty, it just has to be planned out.
Something else that I don’t like using when I’m starting fires is leaves. Leaves are seem like really tempting fire starter at first, but you’ll find that when you burn them all, they do is smoke. They don’t really create a flame. If they’re wet, they really hold moisture and they’re just going to smother any tiny flame that you have. You want to always be making sure that there is air flow underneath your fire structure.
So once you have all your kindling set up, with plenty more at the ready to put it on once the match catches, you can go ahead and light it. I recommend holding the match as upright as possible when you light it, because if you hold it down, not only might you burn your fingers, but since fire burns upwards, a match pointed down will burn through a lot faster.
I try to hold my match in just one place when lighting - I feel like that makes it catch a little bit better than if you just kind of light it several places and move the match a lot. By holding it in one place, it allows the twigs a little better chance to catch. Tiny kindling catches really fast, but it also burns really fast.
When adding more kindling, you want to make sure it snaps whenever you break it. Something bendy would be too wet for the fires. Another thing that’s good kindling is shreds off of a bigger log. You can kind of rip off pieces that are little shreds, and these burn really nicely. Once the fire starts getting a little bit bigger, you can add a little bit bigger twigs, and you want to be constantly adding fuel to your fire. You really have to kind of baby the fire at this point be watching it. If the bigger sticks aren’t catching, don’t be afraid to go back to your little stuff and keep adding tiny kindling. You can always burn something smaller, but it once you’ve smothered it with something huge, it’s hard to go back from there.
Also don’t forget that fire needs oxygen. When you blow on the fire, it doesn’t help it to just blow straight down. What’s going to help more is blowing from the side, or even better, if you can get down where your cheek is almost on the ground, and you can blow from the bottom of the fire.
These are just some tips to get it started and going with one match. The real question is, how long do you have to wait before you can start making smores!?