Yeah, I rarely use an accelerant when I start a fire. It’s a crutch for a bad foundation.

That’s a good description of it, actually. It’s controlled chaos.

Oh, I know. Fire was my hobby as a preteen/young teen, to the point that my mom let me bury a grill so I could burn stuff in it. I was also in the scouts, and won every “start a fire with a single match” competition I was part of.

Last month she had me over to burn a burn pile for her, and she had a 5 gallon canister of diesel that she expected to use all of to start it. I walked around the pile, took 4oz of it, poured it in one spot, then lit a match. The pile was ablaze in about 15 seconds flat and burned out within 2 hours. The diesel wasn’t even necessary, I just used it because she had already poured it.

Building fires is my specialty, and there has never been a fire that I’ve built that would have benefited from the log cabin method. Even the teepee method is unnecessarily complicated.

You don’t need structural stability for a fire. In fact, it’s usually a hindrance. You want it to collapse in a specific way and be able to stir it up.

That’s why you start with a pile of shavings, then add a pile of twigs, then a pile of increasingly bigger sticks up until about 1in in diameter. You don’t put anything heavier on until the base fire is caught and has coals.

This is an oversimplification, of course, because you have to account for airflow.

The teepee shape actually gets the fire going more efficiently, though.

No, I don’t see it as work. It doesn’t require any additional effort on my part. It takes more effort for me to not care.

That’s weird because it requires no effort on my part to be empathetic.

I was unaware that being an empathetic person required any effort.