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How to Build an “Upside-Down” Fire
If you’ve always been a proponent of the tipi-style fire – you know, the type of fire with the tinder on the bottom and sticks and logs organized tipi-style overhead – but never enjoyed the constant prodding and poking necessary to keep the fire alive, this article is for you. Why? Because we’re going to be talking about how to build an “upside-down” or “self-feeding” fire, a fire that requires minimal effort while it’s burning to keep it alive. How can this be possible? Read on.
Forget What You Know About Campfires
An upside-down fire is called “upside-down” because it’s essentially the opposite of the tipi-style fire. In essence, you’ll want to place your biggest logs at the bottom and your tinder at the top. Doing so seems counter-intuitive, but once you build a fire that really lasts by itself, you’ll see how it works.
You start by placing the heaviest logs next to each other as tightly as possible. You take the next biggests sticks and logs and place them perpendicular to the layer beneath, slowly building this way upward until you have a complete “pyramid” style fire. Make sure that the longest sticks/logs are at the bottom, and that they decrease in length moving upwards.When you get to the top, you can use firesticks to get the fire going – firesticks are high-resin sticks that help to start fires. What happens next is how the art of the upside-down fire works: gravity pulls down embers and heats up the layer below, slowly kick-starting the entire fire itself. The result is a relatively slow-starting but long-lasting fire that you don’t need to poke or prod.
How to Practice an Upside-Down Fire
Now that you know the basics, it’s time to do some practicing. Gather plenty of firewood near your closes firepit. You can try building “mini-upside-down” fires in order to start practicing. As you practice, you’ll need to fill in the blanks between reality and this article, so don’t assume you’ll build a perfect fire the first time.
After you’ve built a small fire successfully, you’ll be ready to move onto the bigger ones. Once you’ve mastered these, you will be able to enjoy long-lasting fires that produce a consistent flame, ideal for campfires and the occasional marshmellow. These fires will also be great ways to consistently cook a breakfast skillet in the morning.
Photo Credits: mikemol
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Hiking Speed vs Walking Speed
When many aspiring hikers are interested in learning how to get into “hiking shape” for the summer, a frequent question that comes up is the issue of pace, or speed. While many people don’t care to measure their hiking speed, so long as they work up a sweat, others like to know their speed for navigational and even physical purposes – it helps them measure their progress and calories burnt. If you want to understand your hiking speed, however, you’ll also want to know how it measures against your normal walking speed.
That’s why many people are so interested in the speed at which they hike. To them, their speed reflects their results – if they can make it up a hill in an hour when they used to take an hour and a half, they know that they’ve made tangible progress in their development. So let’s take a look at how hiking speed and walking speed can tell you about the kind of shape you’re in.
A Rule of Thumb
Generally, for every hundred pounds you weigh, you’ll burn about 45 calories per hour going at a speed of two miles per hour – but that’s just on a smooth level surface. The energy output required will approximately double for every mile per hour you increase, meaning you’ll burn about 90 calories per hundred pounds at three miles an hour, and so on.
The reason so many people enjoy hiking is that the incline adds a significantly greater energy requirement to your workout routine, increasing the amount of calories you’ll need to burn in order to go the same distance or the same speed as you would on a level surface. Because an increase in speed requires a similar increase in energy on a smooth level surface, you can expect the same to happen when you’re hiking up an incline.
Don’t Measure Against Walking Speeds
A mile hike is quite different than a mile walk, so don’t try to compare your speed going up a hill with the kind of speed you can expect to see when you walk on an incline. Anyone who’s used the incline feature on a treadmill knows what kind of power requirement gravity can add to any exercise. If you find that you were hiking at two miles an hour but you still feel like you had a decent workout, it’s safe to say that you should judge the quality of your workout by how challenging it felt, not by what the numbers always say.
A good hiking speed will rival a pretty calm walk. Avoid the beginner’s mistake of hiking too fast so that you can build endurance – intermittently include periods of greater intensity.
Photo Credits: justinjohnsen
