Self-Feeding Camp Fire

People are always sending me viral pics and videos of the "14hr Self-Feeding Fire". At first glance, it looks super fun and ingenuitive. But even though I've never made one myself, I have spent many nights near fires and I'm here to tell you how shit this camp-fire design is.

If you and your cottage bros just want to make this crap fire for fun, fine, go nuts, but this is by no means a fire you should attempt to make in a survival situation. Seems like a no-brainer, but why do we need fire? Warmth, cooking, signalling, scaring predators away, psychological resolve. Here's how this fire design fails in all categories.

Heat:

Whether you have a some kind of shelter or not, keeping warm beside a fire is best done with a long, narrow set-up, where you sleep parallel to the long fire. Having the flame/coals be splayed out in a trench the same length as your body is the best way to get the most heat from your fire. Depending on the temperature outside, you'll get about an hour or so of sleep before you need to add some logs.

The self-feeding hopper system blocks all the heat from radiating out sideways along the full length of the fire, so you're stuck trying to absorb what little heat comes from either end.

Cooking:

Boiling water will be important to sterilize as well as perhaps cooking up some squirrels and worms too. Usually you can have stuff boil within minutes of being on an open flame. Unless you're trying to slow-cook some gourmet chilli or pulled pork in the apocalypse, stop wasting your Godamn Ramsay time.

Signalling:

Every video I've seen of this fire shows the flames to be tiny. Unless you throw wet leaves on it or set the whole frame ablaze, you wont signal anything for help. Better get started on your army of Wilson heads.

Security:

Your glow stick will throw more light than this giant night-light. Good luck buddy. The bears and wolves will shit you out before your fire runs out of wood.

The Allspark:

Where your body fails, your mind will win. You could be cold and hungry with a broken leg and your Will can still save you. Survival is 80% mental and seeing a flame can be like an energy shot for your intestinal fortitude. You could be alone and scared, but a fire builds confidence. It can be almost hypnotically powerful. Tending to a fire, watching it's dancing flames, keeping your mind busy by getting firewood and meticulously keeping your fire alive will do the same for your body.

Lastly, the time that goes into constructing this giant pile of crap would be better spent making a log cabin. Unless you have a giant wood saw, cutting those logs into perfect lengths while also making sure they're nice and straight so as to roll down the ramp properly is going to burn a fuck-tonne of energy. Why even bother? It's useless. Build a shelter, set some traps, go forage instead.

If you want your fire to burn slower because maybe you're in the tundra and have very little wood around or something, the best slow camp-fire designs I've seen at are the "top-down" or "inverse log cabin". Put all your big logs as the base, then your smaller sticks, kindling, and tinder at the top. As the flame burns, the embers slowly fall, catching the bigger stuff and slowly burning downwards.