How to Find Dry Firewood

June 2026  ·  Dry Firewood · Prepared Wanderer · West With the Night

A nice rock and a breeze can be your friends.

I put the stove on this rock to catch a steady breeze, keeping the fire hot so I could burn damp wood. The wood itself (willow twigs) was collected on the way to this primo spot.

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One of the first questions people ask about the Ganesha stove is, “can you always find dry wood for the stove?” Having spent years using only the Ganesha stove for backcountry cooking, I no longer have any anxiety about finding fuel. Not only can I find dry wood, but I can get the stove cranking in just a few minutes. Here are all my insider secrets!

Dry Conditions

This is the easiest situation, when you are in a spot with dry twigs up in the trees and on nearby shrubs. I find a good spot to set up, based mostly on whether I want sun or shade, and with the best view. I collect wood for a few minutes. You don’t need much: a double handful is plenty to boil water for several cups of your favorite hot beverage. For cooking food, maybe twice as much. 

In western Colorado, almost every species of tree or shrub provides good fuel: conifers, aspens, cottonwoods, sagebrush, willow, and many more. I like pieces that range in diameter from that of my pinky to that of my thumb - call it from a quarter inch to half inch. Pieces up to 1” in diameter work well, but bigger than that and the pieces have so little surface area that they burn very slowly. Throw a handful in the stove, light it and you are good to go. 

Stove filled with twigs and ready to light

When Wood is Scarce

This is when it’s good to remember that the stove can burn almost any biomass as long as it’s not soaking wet. In this case, I’ll start looking for fuel 10 or 15 minutes before I want to stop. It’s amazing how much fuel you can find, even in a barren landscape. Dung burns too - cow, elk and deer dung all burn well when they are fully dry. And no, it doesn’t smell bad.

It’s Wet, But Not Everything is Drenched

I do 2 things in this case. First, I start looking for fuel steadily as I hike. I’m looking for dry patches on the ground, which means the tree above that patch is keeping everything dry. Then I look for small branches in that dry zone, both up above in the sheltering tree and in shrubs down below. Even if you don’t see dry patches, the driest branches are going to be up against the trunks of the trees. It’s not very hard work to find them and, hey, aren’t you out there to get in touch with nature? 

The second thing I do is find a rock that I can put the stove up on, a foot or two off the ground and ideally with a steady breeze. That will provide the extra air the fire needs to burn hot. The hotter the fire burns, the better it can handle damp wood. 

Everything is Wet, Wet, Wet

This calls for all of the above, plus a few more tricks. If it’s been dry but pouring rain is imminent, I’ll collect a few handfuls of wood and put them in my pack to stay dry. I’ll also look for pitch balls - these form on the trunks of conifers and burn exceptionally well. I usually keep a few in with my fire starting kit. And finally, I collect wood - even if it’s wet - that is the diameter of a piece of string. These are small, dead shrubs, or the finest branches of conifers, juniper, sage and desert plants. They will burn quickly once ignited, but the important thing is that they will burn even when wet.

One more tool for wet conditions is to pack a few sticks of fatwood. This is pine that, because of its spot in the tree, has absorbed pitch. And because pine and pine pitch both burn exceptionally well, it can make the difference between standing around in the cold and wet vs. sipping hot coffee next to the Ganesha stove.

Many people pack an alcohol stove with a few ounces of fuel. The stove goes inside the Ganesha stove and works OK regardless of conditions. The caveat is that alcohol stoves generate far less heat than a wood fire, so it may take 10-15 minutes to bring a pot of water to a boil. 

Up next month: the many different ways to start a fire 🔥

Influencer Spotlight: Wendell Adams, the Prepared Wanderer

Wendell Adams, based in Ohio, does in-depth, real-life reviews on YouTube as the Prepared Wanderer. I love the name - wandering is something I specialize in too, and it’s nice to be prepared. Wendell’s channel runs the gamut from bushcraft skills to how to create the best bug-out bag. He likes practical, budget-friendly gear that works for both beginners and experienced outdoorspeople.

Bushcrafters particularly like cooking Spam, and Wendell is no exception.

Wendell tested the Ganesha in the field, and found it to be an ideal long-term wilderness and bug-out stove. He was won over by its lightweight folding titanium design, the inner insert that doubles as a standalone day-pack stove, and a boil time of under five minutes.

Wendell also compared the Ganesha directly to a similarly sized Firebox stove and found the Firebox to be significantly heavier, even in its titanium version. He gave the edge to the Ganesha for its gasification advantage (cleaner burn, less smoke, less fuel), and for its two-in-one design that lets the inner insert serve as a standalone day-pack stove. You can watch the review on YouTube here.

Share Your Fire - #GaneshaStove

Have you taken your stove somewhere worth seeing? We feature reader photos in every issue. Tag us with #GaneshaStove on social media, or reply to this email with a photo and two sentences about where you were and what you were up to.

Click here to reply now: #GaneshaStove

Thanks to subscriber Thaddeus Ward for this month’s photo, taken in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee

What to Read

West With the Night, by Beryl Markham. This is a magical memoir of Beryl’s days in Kenya (then British East Africa) in the early 1900s. She became an accomplished horsewoman, incredible bush pilot, and made money searching for elephants from a tiny plane. Later, she became the first person to fly nonstop from Europe to America, and the first woman to fly solo east to west across the Atlantic.

“"Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it." -Beryl Markham

More info at ganeshastove.com. Use code DISPATCH10 for 10% off.

Why Your Campfire is so Inefficient

May 2026  ·  May Day Sale · The Science Behind the Stove · Stephen J Reid

Cooking Thai curry

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Finally! Our May Day Sale. Everything at ganeshastove.com is 20% off until May 7. Domestic US shipping is free, and we ship anywhere else in the world for $20 a stove.

In this issue, we share a little bit of the science behind the Ganesha stove, and feature Stephen J Reid, one of our favorite YouTubers.

Why Campfires Smoke and the Ganesha Doesn’t

Part of the process of designing the best possible wood-burning backpacking stove was learning how fires work. One of the surprising things: wood is almost 100% combustible. Smoke is not a waste product of combustion - it will burn, given the right conditions. Smoke is made up of unburned organic gases and carbon particles that the fire generated but lacked the heat or oxygen to ignite. Every wisp of smoke from your campfire is fuel converted to gas, then wasted into the atmosphere. A smoky fire is an inefficient fire.

The key factor is temperature. Wood doesn't burn directly. When heated, it first drives off moisture (thus the hissing and popping), then at 400°F (200°C) begins to chemically decompose through a process called pyrolysis, releasing combustible gases: carbon monoxide, hydrogen, methane, volatile organics. These gases are what actually burns, not the wood itself. The wood becomes charcoal, which will later burn at much higher temperatures. A standard campfire rarely reaches the sustained temperatures needed to combust these gases before they escape. The fire zone is too cool at the edges, too oxygen-variable, too chaotic. 

At 900°F (500°C), something fundamental changes. Combustible pyrolysis gases will ignite if they encounter adequate oxygen at this temperature. This is the threshold the Ganesha is engineered to exploit. Its double-wall construction creates a channel between the inner and outer chambers. As the primary fire heats the inner chamber, the air in this channel gets very hot. This superheated secondary air naturally flows upward, and comes in at the top of the combustion zone, right where smoke is forming and trying to escape. The smoke ignites. Instead of a yellow, sooty flame, you get a bright orange flame of near-complete combustion. The hotter the fire gets, the more efficiently it burns; the more efficiently it burns, the hotter it gets.

This is why the Ganesha's performance improves noticeably after the first minute or two. The stove is warming its own walls, preheating its own secondary air, climbing toward sustained gasification temperature. It’s thermochemistry, but it feels like the easiest fire you’ve ever made.

Influencer Spotlight: Stephen J Reid

Stephen J Reid is a Northern Ireland-based filmmaker, outdoor explorer, and YouTuber. His weekly videos include adventure, hiking, trail running, and visits to places like Narnia (or at least, the area where CS Lewis grew up). Half the fun of the videos comes from his wacky, ebullient personality. He cheerily goes on long adventures to cold, wet, and miserable places, and narrates his journeys.

His verdict on the Ganesha was characteristically direct:

“Works a treat. This thing worked quite well and weighs absolutely nothing. I am impressed.”

— Stephen J Reid

Stephen had no trouble getting a roaring fire going in the Ganesha stove.

The review appeared in his “7kg of Comfort” wild camp load-out video, where it was tested on-trail, not in a studio, in conditions where it actually had to perform. Temps dropped below freezing, Stephen stayed dry and warm, and he had a grand old time. Also, he stopped near the end of his 16-mile backpacking trip to get a burger - not usually a part of my wilderness experiences, but I absolutely approve.

🔥  An Ode to Backcountry Fire

I think most people will agree that there's something special about cooking on a wood fire in the backcountry. It isn't the food (though the food is better) - there is genuine chemistry when you cook over wood, and the smell alone is fantastic. It's something more primal: the sense that you are doing a thing that humans have done, in essentially the same way, for the entirety of human history. Tens of thousands of years of fire-making. Every ancestor you have, going way, way back, gathered around a fire at the end of the day. It’s no wonder we like it.

You find the firewood, and learn more about the landscape while you’re at it. You build the fire, which requires patience and sequence. The reward is a warm, crackling fire and the promise of hot drinks and tasty food. The Ganesha makes this lighter and more efficient. It doesn't make it easier in the sense of removing the engagement. It removes the frustration, so the engagement is all that's left.

Share Your Fire - #GaneshaStove

Have you taken your stove somewhere worth seeing? We feature reader photos in every issue. Tag us with #GaneshaStove on social media, or reply to this email with a photo and two sentences about where you were and what you were up to.

Click here to reply now: #GaneshaStove

Thanks to subscriber Alex Lam for this month’s photo!

What to Read

Endurance by Alfred Lansing - the incredible story of the survival of all the crew of Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The ship was crushed by pack ice and sank. The crew survived on ice for months, made an open-boat crossing of the Southern Ocean, then crossed South Georgia Island's unmapped mountains on foot. The ship's cook, Charles Green, created a “blubber stove” that burned seal and penguin fat. They carried the stove to their ice camps and to Elephant Island, and produced hot meals in conditions that would have broken most people. Perfect for reading next to a fire.

“Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”

— T.K. Whipple, Study Out the Land

More info at ganeshastove.com. Storewide sale 20% off til May 7, but you can always use code DISPATCH10 for 10% off.

Joe Robinet Says It Has a Really Silly Name

April 2026  ·  Joe Robinet · Fire Science · The Why

"It has a really silly name and a silly look to it, but I swear to God it works super, super good, extremely efficient."

— Joe Robinet

Influencer Spotlight: Joe Robinet

Joe Robinet: millions of subscribers, real multi-week wilderness canoe expeditions, zero fluff. He reviewed the Ganesha stove in '19 Days Needed' and delivered our favorite quote in the history of this project.

Thanks Joe!  Joe is not given to hyperbole. When he says “extremely efficient,” he means it. Ganesha appears at the 17-minute mark, but the whole video is worth watching.

Fire Science: The “Silly Look” Explained

The 'silly look' is two nested boxes of sheet metal with visible air gaps — the gap is what preheats secondary air before it reaches the combustion zone. It makes the fire burn hot and clean. Less silly once you've seen it burning.

And the Name? Who is Ganesha?

Ganesha is the Hindu god of welcome. Over a billion people in India and Nepal put a Ganesha carving on their door to welcome in the world. The Ganesha Cookstove Project is a humanitarian venture - we distribute stoves to villagers there - and we wanted a name that everyone would recognize and remember.

Why Folding? Why Ultralight?

For most people traveling in the backcountry, or gallivanting around the world, volume is the enemy. The Ganesha folds to half an inch and slips easily into a bag. The engineering: a folding stove that's rigid enough for a cookpot AND precise enough for gasification, while collapsing flat. That's why it took years to get perfect and earned a patent.

The weight math: 7.8 oz stove, zero fuel weight. Gas stove plus canisters for 19 days? The Ganesha wins, and the fuel never runs out.

What’s Special About Backcountry Fire

A backcountry fire demands something: finding fuel, coaxing flame, adjusting to wind. That small competence, repeated at dusk after a long day, is deeply satisfying. The Ganesha makes it clean without making it push-button.

What to Read

The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz. Seven people escape a Siberian gulag and walk to India through the Himalayas. Fire, food, extreme survival. Makes you grateful for a working stove.

"Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness."

— John Muir

More info at ganeshastove.com. Use code DISPATCH10 for 10% off.