transformative experiences

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

Type 2 fun: why teenagers need hardship, not happiness

Chris Packe Capability

I’ve come to believe that what teenagers need most right now isn’t the pursuit of happiness – it’s quests involving hardship.

This isn’t a call to make teenagers miserable, or to romanticise suffering.  It’s an observation about development: that becoming capable often requires experiences that don’t feel good while they’re happening.

The outdoor world has a useful name for this pattern: it’s called “Type 2 Fun.”

Type 1 Fun: enjoyable while you’re doing it, enjoyable in retrospect. Thorpe Park, a game of Werewolf, Oreo Biscoff banoffee thickshake.

Type 2 Fun: very tough while you’re doing it, deeply satisfying in retrospect. Summit pushes, ice plunges, studying for a driving theory test.  Breaking up with a psycho girlfriend?

Type 3 Fun: not fun during, not fun after – best avoided.  Likely to contain injury, genuine danger, trauma. For me, opera also falls into this category.

Most teenagers can live almost entirely in Type 1 territory. And that’s a problem – not because pleasure is bad, but because it can become the only reference point they have for what “good” means.

One of the most meaningful challenges that teenagers are faced with is dealing with the lack of meaningful challenge.

Why modern teenage life skews so heavily toward Type 1

Being lost used to be a thing, and quite a useful educational tool.

A generation ago, being lost meant sitting with not-knowing. Looking at a map or the Streetmap screenshot you’d printed, figuring it out, maybe asking someone. There was a gap between ‘I don’t know where I am’ and ‘I know where I am.’ You had to sit in the discomfort of being lost while you worked it out.

Now there’s Google Maps, and no more gaps. The discomfort is relieved in seconds, we have lost the feeling of being lost.

That pattern is everywhere – instant gratification provided by apps, for food (Just Eat), entertainment (Netflix), and Everything Else (Amazon Prime).

Type 2 Fun requires living in the gap. And if you’ve grown up never experiencing it, you don’t know it exists. (I’ve written about how boredom – that uncomfortable gap where nothing’s happening – has been almost completely removed from teenage life).

Why Type 2 Fun matters for development

Type 2 Fun isn’t just “character building” in some vague moral sense. It teaches four important lessons that Type 1 Fun cannot.

This delayed gratification, effort now, reward later, is the first one. When there is a gap between satisfaction and payback, the satisfaction is often much deeper and more lasting.

Accurate self-assessment is the way I’d describe the second bit of wisdom.  First-hand experience.  They discover what they’re actually capable of under real conditions, not what adults tell them they’re capable of in comfortable settings.  This can build the sort of confidence that is not inflated or brittle.

The third one is the difference between discomfort and danger.  Most teenagers conflate the two. Type 2 Fun teaches that feeling bad doesn’t mean they’re in trouble – it often just means they’re doing something difficult.  In a world where they have been exposed to constant updates of global crises and conflicts, it has become very important for teenagers to have a realistic perception of danger in their immediate lives, and not “crash out” at the slightest blip (as my son would say).

The final main gift of Type 2 Fun is real confidence.  Enough of that “you’re amazing!” and “you got this” kind of confidence handed out for participation.  Earned confidence is what’s needed: I didn’t think I could do that, but I did.

Adolescence requires genuine challenges where the outcome isn’t guaranteed – the ones that carry enough risk to actually feel dangerous to them. Without these, young people remain psychologically dependent even as they mature physically. They stay stuck in childhood’s safety rather than stepping into adolescence’s necessary risk.

Type 2 Fun provides this.  Real difficulty where discomfort teaches what comfort never could, rather than staged or exaggerated victories.

This kind of experience matters at any age – but there’s a particular window in early adolescence when it lands with unusual force.  I’ve written separately about why timing matters so much between ages 8–15.

What Type 2 Fun actually looks like

Once a year, at the end of October when the night stretches fourteen hours, I run what I call a “fire quest.” At the end of a series of expeditions through the year, teenagers voluntarily tend a fire from dusk until dawn – no food, no phones, no sleeping. Just the fire, the dark, and hopefully a glimpse of the moon to give an idea of the passage of time.

At dusk, I hand each participant an ember from a central fire. They carry it through the Wolf Pack portal – a three-metre archway carved with a wolf’s head, lit by tiki torches – and out to their spot in the woods. If they’ve prepared well (tinder ready, kindling laid, logs stacked), the ember becomes a fire and they settle in for the night.

If they haven’t prepared well, the ember dies. And they have to come back for another one.

One lad spent five hours failing. Lost in the dark, not enough kindling, fire dying repeatedly. Tears, frustration, resignation… but he kept coming back. At midnight, with a bit of guidance and some birch twigs, his fire finally caught. He tended it until dawn.

Five years later, he told me it was one of the kicks in the backside he needed to learn to “lock in” rather than airily waft through life.

That’s Type 2 Fun. Miserable during. Profoundly rewarding after. I’ve written the full Fire Quest story, including why it’s structured the way it is for maximum Type 2 impact, here →.

Why parents struggle with this

The cultural pressure on parents is relentless.  “Failures” in parenting are not looked on well, and the common sense is “We just want our kids to be happy.”

I understand the instinct. Watching your child struggle is uncomfortable. The protective instinct is strong, and legitimate. No parent wants to cause their child unnecessary pain.

But there’s a paradox: happiness and wellbeing aren’t the same thing.

For fathers especially, this often means learning when not to intervene — and trusting that difficulty can be doing useful work.

The more directly you pursue happiness, the more it eludes you. Happiness isn’t a target you can aim at. It emerges as a byproduct of engagement with something difficult and meaningful – not from optimizing for feeling good.

Teenagers who are protected from all discomfort don’t become happy. They become fragile. They learn that discomfort means something has gone wrong, that struggle indicates failure, and that they need rescue.

Wellbeing – the capacity to handle what life throws at you – requires encountering difficulty while you’re still developing.  Risk is an important factor.  This does not mean danger (they are often mixed up), and certainly not trauma.  Just genuine challenge where the outcome matters.

Parents or teachers who instinctively reach to smooth every rough edge aren’t creating happiness, even though their instincts and the cultural messaging encourages them to.  They’re removing the conditions where real satisfaction develops.

The trust required

Type 2 Fun demands trust from both sides.

From teenagers, it’s trust that the adult leading this is competent and knows it will be worth it, that they won’t be rescued at the first sign of discomfort, and that the challenge is hard but survivable.

From parents, it’s the trust that struggle isn’t the same as harm, that their child is more capable than they (or the parent) currently believe, and that discomfort today builds capacity for tomorrow.

This is what much of my outdoor events are designed around: conditions for Type 2 Fun – then stepping back and letting it do its work.  (But it must be said, on Feral Fathers weekends, there is rather a lot of Type 1 fun too).

Not all fun is created equal

Type 1 Fun has its place. Thickshakes are lovely. Thorpe Park is brilliant. Easy days and relaxed, fun moments matter a lot.

But if that’s all teenagers ever experience, they never discover what they’re capable of when things get hard.

Type 2 Fun is this pattern compressed into a weekend or a week.  The teenager leaves home, enters an environment where comfort isn’t guaranteed, faces genuine difficulty, and returns different.  The growth did not come from being taught something, but because they lived through something hard.

This is why time outdoors matters so much: it creates conditions where difficulty is real, bounded, and meaningful – without needing to be manufactured.

That’s the kind of experience I value most for teenagers, and why I wholeheartedly say to parents that I wish hardship for their children, not happiness.

—-

About Feral Fathers

Feral Fathers weekends are built around outdoor challenge – not pure Type 2, but Type 1 with teeth. Climbing trees, building fires and dens, sleeping out, open to the weather, being in a tribe. Fun during, fun after – but harder-edged than indoor life.

My expeditions are more Type 2 territory. Challenging in their nature, dealing with the physical and emotional demands and the unpredictable environment… and deeply satisfying after.  Once you get going, you’re committed.

Woodland weekends in Sussex (ages 8+). Multi-day expeditions in the hills (ages 12+).  Expeditions for teenage groups.

Learn more about woodland weekends → 
Learn more about expeditions →

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

Why multi-day expeditions work better than day trips for teenagers

Chris Packe Capability, Expeditions

Day trips are the backbone of teenage life: the day at the outdoor activity centre, the forest school session.  They are good. They get you out, and they create memories.

But they don’t change anyone.

Multi-day expeditions – three, four, five days in places like Dartmoor or the Lake District – do something fundamentally different. Not because they are longer versions of the same thing, but because duration itself creates conditions that brief experiences simply cannot.

Teacher James Herndon, writing about education in How to Survive in Your Native Land (a remarkable, irreverent book), observed that schools operate on ‘artificial time’ – bells, lessons, arbitrary schedules disconnected from natural rhythms or real needs.  Learning that matters, he argued, requires proper time to unfold.

The same is true in other experiences, especially in the outdoors.  Day trips operate on borrowed time, while multi-day expeditions operate on lived time. For teenagers discovering who they are, that duration transforms the experience entirely.

The second day is when it actually begins

Day one of any outdoor trip runs on nerves first, and then quickly onto excitement.  Everything is new, there’s a significant undertaking ahead, and adrenaline is at work.  Teenagers are still their ‘weekend selves’, just in a different location (I think of it as an ‘indoors mode’).

Day two is different.

The thrill has worn off.  They’re just… here.  On the ground, in yesterday’s clothes, with a day ahead.

They have now arrived.  This is when the real experience begins.

On day trips, this point is never reached. It’s over before the novelty wears off, before anything uncomfortable has to be fully worked through. (I write here about the importance of boredom and avoiding escape routes).

Multi-day expeditions force teenagers through a wide arc of emotion and experience, varying cycles of highs and lows that accumulate into a layered adventure.  By day two or three, they’re not doing the expedition anymore. They’re living inside it.

Gary Snyder writes about the difference between visiting wilderness and inhabiting wildness.  Day trips are visits. Multi-day, you stop visiting.  You become an inhabitant, temporarily – you begin to integrate with it, and gain a sense of being at home in the world.  For a teenager, that wild feeling of belonging in nature is crucial to wellbeing, and profoundly underrated.

Time reveals who they actually are

Teenagers are trying on identities. Some feel real, while some are provisional. It takes robust challenges that test which identities are genuine and which are just performance.

On day trips, the unripe identities stay intact.  There’s not enough time, discomfort, or consequence for anything deeper to surface.

On multi-day expeditions, something else happens. By the second or third day, maintaining a persona becomes harder than simply being yourself.  Energy is finite – the loud one gets tired, the anxious one discovers they cope, the quiet one finds a moment to step forward.

I love how this unveils itself, without any force applied.  Duration does the work, revealing who the actually are.

For a teenager, discovering who they are when they can’t hide is invaluable.  It helps them find their feet… which, even though they have just grown three sizes in six months, is a surprisingly challenging task.

Consequences stretch across days and actually teach something

Modern teenage life is remarkably forgiving: mistakes get reset overnight, discomfort is usually temporary, and poor choices rarely echo forward, allowing the same mistakes to be repeated with low cost.

School operates on what Herndon called “artificial consequences” – grades, detentions, punishments entirely disconnected from the actions themselves.  Get a bad mark, nothing real changes the next day, because there’s no genuine feedback loop.

School operates on what Herndon called ‘artificial consequences’ – grades and detentions disconnected from the actions that caused them. The feedback arrives later, imposed by authority, unrelated to natural results. Get a bad mark on Thursday, your Friday feels exactly the same.  The feedback loop is broken.

Multi-day expeditions restore natural consequences.

Pack your rucksack poorly on day one (or bring one that doesn’t even fit you), your shoulders hurt on day two.  Smash through your snacks on day one, and you’re reduced to begging by the next day.  Allow your feet to get wet, or don’t dry your socks when you do, and you’ve got cold feet for the remainder.

These aren’t punishments, they’re just reality providing clear feedback.  The magic in this is that there is moral development without any moralising.  And because consequences stretch across time, there’s space to adjust, learn, try again.  This is how humans learned for thousands of years before we built systems that protect us from feedback.

So as much as I would love to teach them that their choices shape tomorrow’s experience, that laziness compounds, that you can’t outsource your comfort, and that cooperation isn’t optional when you’re stuck together, it’s better to leave it to be spoken by the hill.  

Real bonds require time – not bonding exercises

One-day outdoor experiences keep groups polite, and roles stay shallow.  I don’t think many individuals are being their raw selves in one of those “3, 2, 1 Let’s Go!” teambuilding situations.

Multi-day expeditions remove that option.  After a hard day’s walking followed by an iffy night’s sleep under a noisy owl, edges start to show.  Especially when faced with the prospect of the same again today.

This sounds negative, but it’s not.  Although we like to applaud positivity, there’s nothing that unites a group like a good whinge.  So… maybe it is negative, but in such a positive way!

It’s the beginning of honesty.

Because there’s no exit, people have to work through it. No one can retreat into politeness or performance; it wouldn’t work. Shared reality replaces social manoeuvring.

This is how trust actually forms: not through bonding exercises, but through staying when things get uncomfortable – and discovering that the group holds.  The result is earned membership and belonging

Group alchemy only happens when there’s time for things to get real.

The inner clock resets

Remember that bad night I mentioned earlier?  That just tends to be Night 1, when they have yet to fully exit ‘indoors mode,’ which is the one where it’s possible to get mad at an owl.

As indoor mode and artificial time fades, without phones, without schedules, without extraction times… there’s a physiological shift.

Sleep deepens.  Teenagers sleep better than they have in months – they are sleeping because it’s dark and they are tired.

Hunger becomes intelligible. “It’s time to eat” is replaced by “I’m actually hungry now.”

Attention stretches, because there is nothing fixing it in place.

When this happens, they are going beyond merely “slowing down” and into internal regulation.  

Their nervous systems recalibrate in prolonged nature time. Circadian rhythms reset to natural light-dark cycles, away from artificial disruptions.  The result is that they feel different, even if they can’t quite put their finger on it.

It’s great to experience your own biology again.

Why this matters

Institutions are a fact of life.  They are essential at scale. But institutional life is characterised by time management, performance measurement and other group-level objectives, and so it encourages orthodoxy over diversity, conformity over individual pace.

For teenagers who are developing at such a rapid rate, it is essential to have time outside of this. Experiences where the unique, slow or quirky can have their time, where masks drop and systems reset. It’s also where parental relationships can really deepen – in different ways with fathers and sons, and with fathers and daughters.

Healthy adolescence cannot be a factory where grown-ups are forged.  It’s a period of individual transformation—messy, uneven, unpredictable.  Transformation needs time and space, which is not something that institutional settings will provide.

That’s why through human history you have seen teenagers enduring prolonged challenges out in nature… and when I’m around, you’ll still see them.

—-

I’m a Mountain Leader who runs multi-day expeditions for teenager groups, and for fathers and children (12+) in Dartmoor, Snowdonia, the Peak District, and the Lake District – as well as weekend camps for fathers and children (ages 8+) in Sussex woodland.

These experiences are designed for duration to do its work, and get you fully out of ‘indoor mode’.

Learn more about woodland weekends → 
Learn more about expeditions →

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