rites of passage

The Fire Quest: Fourteen hours alone in the dark with nothing but a fire to tend

Chris Packe Capability No Comments

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

The father–son relationship window: why ages 8–15 matter most

Chris Packe Fathers & sons

There’s a period in a boy’s life when the father-son relationship carries unusual weight.

It’s not infancy, when care is everything.  This is the realm of motherhood, where dads serve best by serving the mother.  And it’s not late adolescence, when peers, independence, and privacy will often dominate.

It’s the stretch in between – roughly ages 8 to 15 – when a subtle shift is underway that isn’t obvious yet, even to them; their inner world is reconfiguring.

Boys are no longer children… and they’re not yet young men… but their centre of gravity is beginning to move out from the safety of the home, and into the dangerous world: this is now the realm of fatherhood.

And during this window, fathers matter in an incredibly important way.

What’s actually changing between 8 and 15

Around this age, many boys begin to shift their attention outward (at differing rates – slower if they have lots of escape routes to avoid real life).

They become more interested in gaining competence, testing their limits (especially physically) and seeking belonging beyond the immediate family.

They usually won’t articulate any of this (or anything much really).  Often it shows up as friction: restlessness, criticism of their parents, selective withdrawal.  And a decent bit of “peacocking”.  Even though it can be jarring to parents, I love seeing this happen.  It’s a signal – not that there’s a problem to be fixed, but that there’s a developmental transition underway… and an absolutely beautiful one.

The boy is beginning to ask, consciously or not: What kind of person am I becoming, and how do I find my place?  And – brace yourself – Who will show me how to be a man?

These are earth-shattering questions.  And Dads: it is our honour and privilege to be their primary guide in this. 

Why fathers become vital in this phase

During early childhood, a father’s role is largely about presence, safety, and play.  The Procreation role is clearly fulfilled, and attention is often around the masculine roles of Protecting and Providing – keeping the lights on and danger at bay – which are still as relevant as ever for men.

The call to motherhood is pretty clear: it is biological, obvious, and so it is well understood.  The call to fatherhood, however, is not so obvious.  No-one taps you on the shoulder and says, “now”.  It is even possible to think that the father’s contribution might stop after the Procreation stage, that having a father around is optional.

No.  Both roles deserve to be understood.  But fatherhood’s lack of clarity means it needs more conscious attention – especially during this window, when it becomes the most important thing.

Guiding boys through a change in orientation

In the book Iron John, Robert Bly tells of a boy who steals the key to the wild man’s cage from under his mother’s pillow. The boy can’t free the wild man while staying under the mother’s protection. He has to leave safety to access wildness.

That’s what’s happening between 8 and 15. Boys aren’t rejecting home – they’re outgrowing it. The restlessness, the friction, the need to test limits: this is the key being stolen.

Boys enter a phase where it no longer appropriate for them to be kept close.  They become independent enough to be watching how a man moves through the world, and Dad is the First Man.

The boy is looking at how a man handles difficulty, courts risk, responds to uncertainty, engages with effort, manages and extends his own limits.

Fatherhood becomes about helping the boy begin facing, and exploring, the world beyond the home, with all its toil and teeth and temptation.  The role here is less about shaping outcomes, and more about setting the stage for his journey into the world.  It’s not about initiating a boy into manhood at 12, but helping him build the internal foundations that make that transition possible later.

That maturing happens primarily through shared experience, not instruction. Expertise is not needed.

Why nature plays a crucial supporting role

Conversation is generally not used as a method of communication between men and boys as often as in most other relationships, so it’s usually about doing rather than talking.

Boys thrive off experiences that require effort and involve challenge, that are risky and uncertain, and that involve choices that matter.  They also need a sense that things don’t revolve around them (as much as they might furiously peacock).

That’s quite a list, but the outdoors delivers it effortlessly.  Nature is hugely beneficial to fathers and sons. This makes sense, because this is the environment that shaped us into the human beings we now are – physically, emotionally, spiritually, all the ways you might come up with.

Out in nature, neither father nor son is fully in charge.  Weather, terrain, fatigue, and time all have a say, and don’t accept the excuses that work indoors.  Plus, there are just so many cool things to do.

That changes the relationship: the father doesn’t have to be the entertainer or problem-solver, and the son isn’t the consumer of attention.  This shared engagement, inside the awesome and mysterious container of nature, creates conditions that are hard to reproduce elsewhere.

(It is worth noting that the father doesn’t always need to be present – sometimes the role is to send the child out into experiences on their own, and support from a distance. A good example of a formative nature experience that fathers play an important role in ‘sponsoring’ is the fire quest, which lands particularly well in the 12-15 age range, and I write about here →.)

What happens if the window is missed

With no obvious call to action, this ‘window’ can be missed, and it’s possible that no-one notices the loss… but something is lost.

I suspect what makes this omission possible is that, in my view, fatherhood is less understood and therefore less celebrated than motherhood.  They deserve to be on an equal footing, equally critical, but with their importance peaking at different times.  When absence from home (for work, or through separation) is seen as quite normal, fathers should not be blamed for ‘missing the call’.

But without enough father energy during this phase, boys often turn almost entirely to peers, or online spaces.  These can offer belonging and even inspiration – but they can’t offer what a father can: a real, embodied, present guide who knows them.

Once the window begins to close, influence becomes harder to offer directly. The relationship can still deepen – but the leverage point has passed.

Why this matters

Between 8 and 15, boys are assembling an internal map.  Even though they don’t consciously know it, they are asking important questions.  What am I capable of?  What do I do with my energy?  Do I belong – and to what?  What kind of man am I becoming?  Who really sees me?

Girls have menstruation to provide a physical and mythological frame for their deep changes, as women have pregnancy and childbirth.  Boys have no equivalent marker for their transition – no physical signal that something fundamental is changing.  The shift for boys is less obvious, which is why it can be missed – by fathers and by boys themselves.  But it’s happening, and it needs attention.

They need a mentor, a guide, to take them places they can’t go by themselves, and to share experiences where those important questions can be explored, so their maturity can blossom, eventually into full grown men in every sense.

Recognising this, and responding to it, is one of the most important moments of fatherhood there is.  It is a coming of age for us too.

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This is what Feral Fathers weekends and expeditions are built around: the 8-15 window, when fathers and sons (and daughters) can build something that matters.

Weekend camps in Sussex woodland (ages 8+). Multi-day expeditions in the hills (ages 12+). Small groups, no phones, lots of fun.

Learn more about woodland weekends → 
Learn more about expeditions →

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