Backpacking Tips & Tricks: Cooking

If you are a past student, an instructor, or a wilderness enthusiast, you have been in this situation: the fire won't build, and you're hungry. Hopefully, you finally succeeded, or maybe you resulted to eating raw food. In the case of the latter, we have gathered a few tips to help you the next time you are starving in the wilderness.

So here are some helpful tips:

• Where: on a sandy or rocky area (or near a supply of sand and water so as to avoid forest fires!)
• Most common mistakes: choosing poor tinder, failing to shield precious matches from the wind and smothering the flames with too-large pieces of fuel
• Four Key components: spark, tinder, fuel, oxygen
• How to create a spark: matches, a lighter, flint against steel, electric spark from a battery, or sun rays through a magnifying glass

Or if you are a serious camper ready to make your own stove (and avoid the struggles of building a fire), see this 1.5-minute video for making a do-it-yourself stove out of a can, a tac, a razor, antifreeze, a piece of tape, and a small piece of insulation.