Northern Ireland Outdoors Forum - Hiking, camping and more
Outdoor Activities => Northern Ireland Camping and Bushcraft => Topic started by: RedLeader on January 05, 2010
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Found this firelighting technique that looks interesting
http://www.survivaltopics.com/survival/the-dakota-fire-hole/
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You never know .............. we may have to resort to this technique this weekend ;D
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I've built this type of fire a few times before, and I would dispute some of the claims on the linked site. The bit about having less smoke is nonsense. If you burn green or slightly damp wood you will get smoke, regardless of whether it is in a hole or not. You will also need to either dig an additional air intake (If the wind direction changes, the additional air intake is useless) for the pit or else you will need to stand and flap a hat or some other implement to blow air into the fire to get it hot enough so that it begins to create it's own convection. This uses quite a bit of fuel. Also, the fire hole is an inefficient use of the fires radiated heat as a fair bit of heat is absorbed by the ground. It is not a good fire for keeping you warm. It does, however make for a good cooking platform, but you could easily make a tripod for a surface fire.
basically, a surface fire is more practical than a pit fire, unless you plan to use the pit as an oven for hot stone cooking.
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I tend to agree with most of what CG is saying. If you do manage to het the fire going though it does burn very hot though you will need a lot of fire wood as it burns very quickley. As for a survival fire, unless you are on the run from the cavalry it is useless as it gives off no heat unless you are directly above it. On a more serious note if sited wrongly even when filled in this type of fire can cause big problems if it takes hold underground. I would never see the real need for this in a survival situation, little heat hard to construct hard to light hard to keep going and no signal use I'm surprised to see it spoken of so highly on a survival site. Another name is the scout fire.
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the scout fire sounds about right. we used them years ago in the scouts, that and the alter fire where the favorits. Used mostly for cooking, heat was'nt so important in the summer time and it was easy to fill it in and replace the sod when it was finished with. It does seem a lot of trouble to go to in a survival situation though.