We are eagerly planning for our trip to CO in April. There’s a pile of supplies slowly accumulating as Amazon deliveries come in, and lists are being made for packing, meals, activities along the way, and camper readiness projects.

I will admit to being a bit of a pyromaniac, so I’m really looking forward to some good campfires on our trip. I have a box packed with newspaper and cardboard ready to go. Generally, you are not allowed to bring firewood along for the ride. Due to invasive pests, you are only allowed to burn local wood, and we usually scour the campground for downed branches for our fires. Sometimes it’s hard to find good, dry wood, and those fires are hard to start and keep going.

My experiment for this trip is to see if homemade fire starters will help promote awesome campfires. John has been busy building kitchen cabinets, so we have a supply of sawdust in the “cabinet shop” (aka the downstairs bathroom awaiting renovation). Armed with some soy candle wax and our next empty egg carton, I got to work – more fun than work.

The wax came in flake form, and I used an empty jam jar to melt it in a pan of hot water. There’s a lot of air in those flakes, so a full jar melts down to about half full.

I cut the top off my cardboard egg carton and filled each cavity with sawdust and wood shavings. Then I poured the melted wax in to fill the carton. This took several meltings of wax, and I used the full one-pound bag for a dozen fire starters. In between pourings, I mashed the shavings down with a wooden skewer and added more to fill the cavities. Once hardened, the carton was easy to slice into 12 pucks.

Hopefully, these will burn long enough and hot enough to get my campfire blazing. I’ll post photos from our trip!