fire quest

Once a year, at the end of October when the night stretches fourteen hours from 5pm to 7am, I run a version of what is understood to be an ancient teenage ritual, called a “fire quest.”

Teenagers volunteer to tend a fire through the night, from dusk until dawn.  The main parameters: a 24 hour fast, solitude, no watches, phones or torches.  And no sleeping.  Just the ‘quester’, the fire, and the dark.

The task: tend your fire through the night until morning.

It’s perhaps the most “Type 2” experience I have offered – very testing (sometimes miserable) during, and profoundly satisfying after.  But it’s also something more than that.

Joseph Campbell spent decades studying stories across cultures and noticed they all follow the same pattern: the hero crosses a threshold, leaves the familiar world behind, faces trials alone, and returns transformed.  He named this arc “The Hero’s Journey”, and I strongly recommend this book: “The Power of Myth”.

That’s the structure the fire quest follows, in a highly embodied way.

How the ritual works

During the daytime, after having a light breakfast, the last food until that time the next day, the participants spend their time choosing a location to spend the night.  This location must be suitably distant from anyone else, with a feeling of remoteness that matches their appetite.  They forage for fuel: tinder and kindling to get the fire going, logs to last the night, and branches to flare it up if the fire gets low.

We also spend some time in group conversation, where they identify and speak aloud their intentions for the night: what they are committing to in terms of the parameters, and two qualities that they have chosen, that have meaning for them, and that they will seek to practice through challenges of the night.  I remember one of my favourites was when a lad chose “Lightheartedness” and “Devotion” – truly inspiring and very wise, in my view.

At dusk, I light a large fire in the centre of camp.  This is where I’ll stay all night – present but not interfering, available but not rescuing.

The Wolf Pack portal stands beyond the glow of the central fire: a three-metre chestnut with a carved wolf’s head at the top. It has been decorated with bracken and holly berries, and two torches burn on either side.  A path leads from the central fire, through the portal, and out into the woods.

This is the way out. And fourteen hours later, the way back.

One by one, each participant comes forward.  I hand them a glowing ember from the central fire – carefully carried on a chunk of birch bark, or a flat fragment of wood.  They carry it through the portal and out to their spot.

They chose their spot earlier in daylight, and it was easy to go back and forth.  Did they prepare for making the journey in darkness, balancing a precious and precarious ember?  When the light goes, the woods become a completely different place.  Sometimes, this early moment is where they realise how much their previous decisions have mattered!

At night, they can’t see each other. Can’t hear each other. The ones further out are entirely alone.

If they prepared well enough to get to their spot in good time, then it’s time to find out if they put in enough work with their fire preparation – tinder gathered, small kindling laid thick, enough logs stacked to last fourteen hours.  All this seems so obvious in the daytime.  If they prepared well, the ember becomes a flame, the flame becomes a fire, and they settle in for the night.

Every two hours through the night, I do a patrol. I don’t interact, don’t speak – just check from a distance that everyone’s still there, still tending.  They’re alone, but they’re held.

If they haven’t prepared well, the ember dies on the walk. Or it dies before catching. Or, worst of all, they enter a wrestling match with a dying ember, where they burn through all their tinder, and exhaust most of their kindling…  If it doesn’t work, they come back through the dark and through the portal for another ember.  This is not a walk of shame, it’s an important part of the process, and one of the more obvious forms of feedback that the fire quest gifts its participants over the night.

Can they manage their frustration enough to learn from the failure and get it right second time?

Or are they at a stage in their lives where they need some very hard medicine from the fire…

The five-hour failure

One lad spent the first five hours failing.

It started badly and stayed that way. He took an ember and set off into the woods, then realised – there in the dark – that he hadn’t marked his route properly in daylight.  He wandered, uncertain, the ember dimming as he searched.  It died in his hands before he reached his spot.

He came back through the portal and tried again.

When he did manage to arrive in time, another problem surfaced.  He hadn’t gathered enough of the right fuel – not enough thin, dry twigs to catch the ember and coax it into flame.  The ember glowed, smoked, and went out.  Back through the portal.

Each return (there were lots) was quieter than the last.  His jaw set.  His shoulders slumped.  Sometimes there were tears.  Sometimes a kind of brittle determination.

Each time, we sat together by the central fire, and I asked the same two questions: What happened? What will you do differently next time?

His answers changed as the night wore on. At first they were vague, defensive. Then they were resigned, or desperate.  Later they became more precise, as he finally began to slow down, notice and plan.

By this point, the fire was teaching him far more effectively than a person ever could.

By around 11pm – five hours into the night – I judged that he’d had enough fire medicine, and he was ready to move himself on.  I walked him close to his spot so he wouldn’t lose his way, and gave him a proper bundle of dry birch twigs and a generous handful of tinder.

“Pay attention,” I said. “Make it count.”

Then I walked away. And, of course, doubled back quietly to watch from behind a tree.

This time, he didn’t rush. He built carefully. He placed the ember into the tinder, sheltered it, breathed steadily. The ember flared. A small flame was taken by the tinder, which he then fuelled with the kindling, into a fire that would hold.

I left him to it.

He tended that fire until dawn, and didn’t let it die.

In the morning, he was too exhausted to make much sense of the night. He could see, dimly, how hard he’d made it for himself – and how, after that first long stretch of failure, the rest of the night hadn’t felt quite so impossible.

Years later, when we spoke about it again, the lesson had landed more clearly.  He said it was one of the experiences that finally taught him to “lock in” – to stop drifting, to take preparation seriously, to stay with things when they got uncomfortable.

The fire hadn’t told him any of that – it had simply refused to work until he changed how he showed up.

What the deep night teaches

For those who get their fire lit without drama, the first few hours feel almost manageable.  There’s novelty, a bit of nervous energy.  The fire is crackling and feels like a win.

But by 10pm, novelty has worn off.  Time becomes unmeasured – only the moon (if it’s out, if they remember to watch it) offers any sense of how far through the night they are.  Cold arrives, maybe rain.  The fire demands constant attention, but beyond that, there’s nothing to do. Boredom – real, unavoidable boredom with no escape route – settles over everything.

And so it becomes all about the fire.  Too many logs and it rages wastefully, burning through their supply. Too few and it starts to die, and their hopes with it. They have to stay present.  Read the flames.  Adjust.  Tend.

By 2am, they are truly in the void – no idea how long they’ve been awake, no idea when dawn will come.  Hungry, cold, tired.  The initial determination – I’m going to do this, I’m going to succeed – has dissolved. They’re not achieving anymore, not performing. Just sitting with the fire, and with the passages of thoughts and changing emotions that flicker in and out like the flames.

Alan Watts* spent his life trying to explain something Western culture finds almost incomprehensible: that you can’t find yourself by looking for yourself.  The more you grasp for identity, security, or self-knowledge, the more it slips away.  He called it the backward law.

The fire quest works because it exhausts the grasping.  It’s fourteen hours of nothing to do except tend a fire and sit with what’s actually present when all the striving stops.

Watts would probably say the teenager doesn’t ‘discover who they are’ through the fire quest.  They discover that the question itself was the problem.  But they are unlikely to get to that level of philosophical insight. They come back different. That’s enough.

It’s uncomfortable, but they put up with it. That’s the point.

* Alan Watts is a hero of mine, and a big influence.  A book of his to read before you die: The Wisdom of Insecurity.

The Return

When they come back through the portal at dawn, they don’t say much.

They’re smoked, hollow-eyed, and slow.  But there’s a steadiness in them, the kind that comes for completing something difficult.  No swagger, just a quiet confidence and a note of humility that is very pleasing to see in a teen.

They stayed.  They kept the fire alive.  Or maybe they didn’t – often the fire dies because they were unable to stay awake.  This is a healthy, valiant failure that is just as valuable.  The main thing in that they stayed out in the arena – they didn’t quit.

Later, over a fried brekkie round the fire and the first real warmth of the day, the stories begin to surface.  They are mostly practical and understated, but full of small moments that mattered more than they realised at the time.

Years later, the meaning arrives.  One told me that it taught them they could handle more than they thought.  Another remembers it as the first time she’d ever sat with herself without distraction. The five-hour lad said it taught him to lock in.

They don’t always know what crossed with them when they crossed the threshold.  Only that they did – and that something useful came back.

About the fire quest

The fire quest runs once a year, in late October, and is by invitation only for teenagers (ages 12+, a window when experiences like this land particularly well) who have attended my Wolf Pack programmes Feral Fathers expeditions and are ready for this level of challenge.

For most teenagers, the fire quest isn’t a starting point — it’s something they grow into.  If you’re interested in multi-day expeditions that might lead to fire quest eligibility, or woodland weekends as an entry point) a night sleeping in a den you’ve made is a good step in the right direction!):

Learn more about woodland weekends → 
Learn more about expeditions →

Email: cpacke@yahoo.co.uk | WhatsApp: 07940 272474