The Power of Proper Prep: Spark to 5 Foot Flames in 2 Minutes

Proper preparation makes all the difference. If you take the time to stack the deck in your favor, a fire will all but light itself. This was a fun exercise to demonstrate the power of proper prep and ideal materials. In this case, I chose some ideally charred punk wood to take the spark and poured lots of it into a big pile of western red cedar curls. I got lucky and had sparks land on the first strike.

After that it was hands-off and all the footage is in real time.

I set the fire up so that the breeze would blow the resulting flames into a pile of shavings, fine split kindling, and progressively larger pieces of split wood.

I had the benefit of a beautiful day and a nice breeze, but this level of prep will get the job done in just about any conditions that nature will throw at you. The breeze made this especially easy, but you could accomplish the same thing by fanning the char with a sit, hat, or even a slab of bark.

In general I prefer to throw kindling over top of the flaming tinder bundle rather than building a pre-existing fire structure but the point of all of this is to show that if you put in the work ahead of time selecting and processing the right materials, the rest is almost automatic.

I used a piece of western red cedar driftwood, which is probably the easiest wood in the world to process down into kindling, so making this pile only took about fifteen minutes. If you are using tougher wood it will take longer, but rushing isn’t the answer.

Most fires fail before they are ever lit. Making sure that you have more than enough quality tinder, fine kindling, and progressively larger fuel on hand is what makes the difference between success and failure when it has been raining for weeks.

I set this up as an ideal demonstration, but I have included links to more realistic demonstrations as the end of this video that you can check out if you’re interested.

Materials Used

Sparks: Carbon Steel Striker & Quartz
Char: Black Cottonwood Punk
Tinder, Kindling, Fuel: Western Red Cedar Driftwood

Knife: ESEE Junglas II

Music: Fresh Fallen Snow – Chris Haugen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t31zd-T8gKg