George Rebane
We have always had lots of firewood and kept a fire going in the fireplace most of the year. As a camper and backpacker, I have made a fire or two in the woods over the decades. And I've often been asked about how I build and maintain a reliable and long-burning wood fire. As a techie, I started studying the behavior of small fires at an early age, and here I distill my approach to the care and feeding of indoor and outdoor wood fires - Download 'On making and maintaining a wood fire'. In any event, it's a diversion to the usual stuff that appears in these pages.
I have heard that manzanita burns exceptionally hot, and perhaps because of th redish color, some folks have confused it with madrone. A great freeze in the East Bay in the 1970's resulted in the Regional Park service allowing anybody to cut down the now dead euc's, and that's where I learned chain saws. Campfires learned in Yosemite Valley, during childhood years, from mom and dad, and from Sierra Club books, and from, "To Start a Fire," by Jack London.
Posted by: Douglas Keachie | 04 January 2012 at 09:16 PM