The Smudge Fire - Mosquito Hack

hey everyone Dave here if you hate mosquitoes as much as I hate mosquitoes I got a little trick I want to share with you today stick around so this year so far I've been doing all kinds of trail maintenance on the north country trail and volunteer with the north country trail and right about now mosquitoes get to be super crazy now in order to do this you're gonna need a couple things first of all I like to use a soup can because once it's destroyed I don't really care too much about it and a coat hanger and you simply just drill a couple holes in either side of the soup can grab an old hanger wire hanger bend it around bend the tips of the coat hanger so that they'll fit into the can put them in the cannon then you've got this little dangly pot thing now that's that's the smudge pot so simple how to make a smudge pot now in order to do the smudge itself here's what you need as you're in the forest what you need to be looking for is something called punk wood or something a lot of people refer to as punk wood and basically what punk wood is punk wood is dead dry rotten wood I mean it is wood where a lot of the materials you know that hold it together it's just kind of like power so many people call powder wood because you know when you break it you kind of turn into powder you need dry Punk wood and a lot of times you're gonna find it any downed tree you look for really old downed trees along the ground and all you're gonna do is you're going to take your dry Punk would put chunks of it in you can like this all I'm gonna do now is just take a lighter and light it okay let's light that thing on fire and although you don't want it to flame like a fire fire you do want to get it going enough so that you get a fair amount of smoke now once the things good and lit here's what you're gonna have you're gonna have a little pot of smoke that's just kind of smoldering there there's no flames when you make a smudge pot like this one thing i really suggest against is putting any kinds of holes in the cup and there's two reasons for that one you don't want any oxygen feeding this fire you want it to just smoke like this because that's really gonna keep the mosquitoes away the other reason is because if for some reason you're in an area that's susceptible to forest fires and you really got to be careful with this for this reason as well you know you've got you're basically carrying around a fire and you don't want any of those embers or anything to fall to the ground you just want it to just burn down very slowly and just put off this nice slow you know smoke once you get this thing started with some dry Punk with one of the things that you can do is if you find some wet Punk wood you can actually add that on and as the rest of it smolders you know it dries that wet Punk without and then will eventually consume that as well if you need more smoke at any time all you got to do is blow in it and you can see that's that's gonna stoke the fire enough to give me a little bit more smoke and before I take off here I just can't express enough how important it is that you put these completely out you don't want any kind of forest fires going on it so what I've done is I've cleared up the spot of just dirt and all you're gonna do is take the thing and flip it over and you're gonna wait there until there is no smoke coming out either of those holes and then finally as a precaution I got a I've got a little creek nearby I'm gonna dump my coals out in it when I'm done it's really cool how effective this is in terms of keeping away mosquitoes and although I wouldn't suggest this for everyone you know for someone like me that is out every single day it seems working on the trail or you know outside doing stuff I don't want to put chemicals on me every single dad rather just have something like this that's gonna tell the mosquitoes you're not welcome here so anyways that's a smudge pot super simple super easy super cheap and just something that I thought I'd share with you something I learned along the way that might help keep you out of the loony bin from all the mosquitoes that are coming out of this season anyways thank you guys so much for watching this video I really appreciate you tagging along and I just want to say I apologize I haven't been putting out videos like I used to I had in the past if you've been following some of my other feeds you know that I've been really busy with the north country trail Association building bridges like the one you see behind here and maintaining trail through my area and so a lot of my free time has been caught up in doing that sort of thing and so I apologize for not putting as many videos out as I have in previous years but this tip has really really saved my sanity this year and I wanted to share that with you hey if this was helpful to you appreciate it giving you a thumbs up if you haven't done so yet subscribe and definitely share this with all of your friends who hate mosquitoes as much as I do otherwise thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video or let's the outdoors take care

Channel: David's Passage

Views: 28,008

Keywords: mosquito hack, smudge fire, bushcraft, mosquito, David's Passage, davidspassage, outdoors, hiking, backpacking, wilderness, camping, mosquitoes, deet, permetherine, smudge, smudge pot, survival, smoke, punkwood, punk wood, bush craft, DIY, outdoor tips, hiking tips, mosquito tips, mosquito hacks, dakota fire hole, bush mosquito pop can smoker

Id: sZrOetaKYiA

Length: 4min 59sec (299 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2016