Anthony Domke, guest columnist and member of the Corrupt survivalist group, recently published a post on his experience with setting up fires:

Until this spring I'd never started a fire without paper, which I personally find quite ridiculous. (There is no reason that human today shouldn't be able to light and build a fire easily. For much of human history our very survival depended on being able to do it, but modern people, myself included, have no idea how to.) I've experimented a bit with fire-building this year, and I've quickly realized it can be pretty demoralizing. Early in the spring I decided I should take it slow and work up completely incompetent to highly skilled by working thusly:

First, make sure I can get a fire going with only natural materials and a lighter. No paper, no gasoline; dry leaves and wood shavings should be good enough.

Then, get to the point where I can build a fire and light it with only one match.

After that, work up the courage to do it with a spark only. Can't be that hard, right? I'm smarter than a Neanderthal.

The first spark fire can be done with a firesteel and char cloth; this isn't cheating. Once I've done this, I want to do it using only natural materials (not counting my knife, which is carbon steel). First use the firesteel and punky wood or moss, or anything else that will hold a spark; then find a piece of flint rock that will create a spark when struck against my knife and repeat.

Anthony has published two videos to show how this works. In this video he demonstrates how to ignite a small fire using pitchwood:

The second video is a longer demonstration of how to create a larger camp fire:

Read Anthony's entire post here: "Building a fire"

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