This Clever Camping Hack Lets You Start A Fire In Almost Any Weather With Just 4 Ingredients

Our ancestors survived for approximately 250,000 years using spears, bows, foraging, and fire, until the domestication of plants transformed us into homebound agriculturalists around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. And while the ancients had limited ways of making fire, we've got pounding on steel till it turns hot, stirring potassium permanganate and glycerine together, the tried-and-true hand spindle method (spinning a stick on wood), and perhaps easiest for campers and hikers: aluminum foil and battery meets cotton and petroleum jelly.

Strictly speaking, this clever four-part method of producing fire really only requires a battery and aluminum foil to ignite the fire. You get a simple AA battery and strip the paper off the tip. Take a thin strip of foil (even something like a gum wrapper will do) and press the opposite ends of the foil against the battery's tip to make a circuit. The battery's electrons start to flow and boom: instant fire. This is basically a kid's science experiment. Aluminum foil is a superb electrical conductor, but in its flat and thin, high surface area-to-volume form, it can't handle the flow of electrons and ignites. Congratulations, caveman. 

And where do the cotton and petroleum jelly come into play? They're like a fuel-meets-containment combo. Your brief foil-battery flame won't burn for long without the third element of the fire triangle to go along with heat and oxygen: fuel. You'll need the usual tinder like grass, brush, or bark, plus the cotton to help you ignite the tinder. Petroleum jelly doesn't burn, but cotton does, meaning the cotton will burn and the petroleum jelly will prolong the combustion. Now, you've got an honest-to-goodness four-piece fire starter kit that's portable, containable, and good for any weather. Huzzah. Warmth, light, and cooked food await.

Folks are always looking for ways to hack the camping experience, which means that the four-piece aluminum and battery plus cotton and petroleum jelly method is in good company. Some folks want to buy a magic product to soothe their outdoor woes, like an affordable double camping chair from Costco. Some folks need tents suitable for all the desert shenanigans going on at Burning Man. Other times, folks just want an easy way to make coffee in the cold, dewy quiet of a forest morning. On this note of ease, you don't even need a proper roll of aluminum foil for our four-piece fire-making method. We have already mentioned gum wrappers, to which we could add any other product that has a foil wrapper or strip. If you're skilled enough, you can make a fire without needing to buy a whole roll of aluminum foil.

As for the rest of your fire kit prep, you can build a set of individual kits ahead of your trip. Consider one AA battery, a strip of foil, a ball of cotton, and a glob of petroleum jelly to be one individual kit (just don't pack the battery in contact with the foil). If you'd like, you can keep the batteries and aluminum in separate containers and the jellied cotton bundles in another. If you want to be extra safe, you might want to consider packing backups of everything, like a jar of petroleum jelly. Packing these items in plastic bags will keep everything shielded from rain or snow. Taking them out of your bag and trying to start a fire in the rain is another issue entirely. For that, you might want to hang a tarp.