How this works
Five rules. Two of them are about fire, because fire is the one that can cost somebody else something.
- 01
There are no stupid questions here.
Nobody is born knowing what fatwood is, or which way to hold a ferro rod, or why their fire keeps dying twenty seconds in. If you open a message by apologising for asking, we will skip past the apology and answer the question. Most people watching this stuff have never done any of it. That is the whole audience, not the embarrassing edge of it.
- 02
Every fire goes dead out.
Cold to the back of your hand, every time, before you walk away. Not buried — buried coals stay alive for days and creep through roots. Drown it, stir it, drown it again, then put your hand in it. A fire you are not completely sure about is a fire you are not finished with.
- 03
Check the restrictions before you strike anything.
Fire restrictions in Arizona change through the season and by district, and they are not advisory. Every page here that involves fire carries the date it was last checked against the agency, because a stale restriction page is worse than no page at all.
- 04
We name regions. We never name spots.
No springs, no stump patches, no claims. Pressure follows specificity, and a place named on the internet does not stay the way you found it. So we teach you to read a drainage, judge a stump, and find it yourself — which works everywhere, not just at the one place we could have pointed at.
- 05
Watching is not doing.
This is the only rule aimed at you rather than at us. Every video and every article ends with a ten-minute assignment on ordinary ground. The gap between watching a thousand hours and being able to do one thing is not talent. It is one rep, and nobody can take it for you.
Take the answer and go outside.