Fall Camping & Wood Fires Go Together
October 2026 · Cooking Full Meals · Tech Focus · Shinya Nagaoka
Smashburgers and local mild chilies at 10,000 feet.
Fall in the mountains of Colorado is moody. Days of rain, snow on the high peaks, and then brilliant, low-angle sunshine that makes you want it to last forever. Now is the time to take advantage of any bit of good weather and get outside before the snows reach down to the valley floors.
Using my Ganesha stove is great on a hot summer afternoon - but on a fall evening with a chill in the air, it’s dreamy. Here’s what I do differently:
Since it’s so pleasant to sit around the stove, I cook full meals. Recent ones include an Indian curry, smashburgers with local mild peppers, and a breakfast of bacon and eggs. A nonstick titanium frying pan is a great help for this, and I’ve also lugged in a 2-liter cookpot for pasta (both sit on top of the stove).
I gather extra firewood. After I’m done cooking, I put thicker sticks vertically in the stove to make a nice warm fire.
I prep everything to make hot coffee in the morning while I’m sitting in bed. I gather a selection of sticks, fill my pot with water, and put the stove within arm’s reach of my sleeping bag. In the cold morning, I sit up, start the fire, put on the pot to boil and doze off for a few minutes. If I’ve done it right, I wake back up to a pot of boiling water and can then sit up in bed, drinking coffee and watching the sunrise.
When it’s time to simmer your dinner on the Ganesha stove, here’s the trick. Make sure you have a bed of coals, which usually takes burning for 10-15 minutes. At first, that might be enough for simmering, but the fire will keep cooling. Then, use small sticks (about the size of your pinky) one or two at a time to keep the flame burning.
A scrumptious curry with egg. All the ingredients fit in a small container, and cooking took less than 10 minutes.
Tech Focus: What’s With the Piece That Says “Top”?
Every Ganesha stove comes with a metal piece attached to the main stove body with a chain. When you unfold the stove, it fits right around the stove pegs and sits on top of the inner chamber. Simple - but what’s it for?
First, it keeps the stove from collapsing back down. That’s critical, but not its main purpose.
We call this piece a “secondary air diverter” because when it’s in place, it shunts air from beneath and around the stove into the fire (that’s the secondary air). All the little holes punched into the firebox, right below the diverter? That’s where the secondary air comes into the fire.
The outer firebox is designed to let air in at the bottom and flow all around the inner firebox. As that air heats against the inner firebox, it rises. So it naturally hits the diverter and pushes itself into the fire. No moving parts.
This makes the fire much more hot and efficient, and gives the fire extra superheated air to help it burn smoke. Will the stove work if you don’t put the plate in? Definitely - just not as well.
I didn’t want anyone to lose this key part of the stove, so I put it on a chain. And the word “top”? With that facing up, the chain won’t get in the way.
Influencer Spotlight: Shinya Nagaoka
Shinya reached out to me one January day and asked to review the Ganesha stove. He publishes videos only in Japanese on YouTube. But I thought, why not? He went on to produce strikingly beautiful videos of him using the stove in dramatic landscapes. Many of his followers went on to purchase stoves, which was gratifying, but I was pleased just to watch the videos themselves. I think you’ll enjoy his channel, @fy-outdoors. His Ganesha stove videos are here and here.
A few screenshots from Shinya’s videos. He makes all of us want to get outdoors more often.
A Ganesha Stove Makes a Great Christmas Present
Now that it’s October, Christmas is right around the corner. If you are considering getting a stove for someone in your life, now is the time to order it. Be sure to use your 10% subscriber discount with the code DISPATCH10.
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Subscriber David Huggins, sauteeing some garlic and tomato with sardines for a Mediterranean pasta
What to Read
Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure, by Admiral Richard E. Byrd
This book starts with a crazy idea. Sink a plywood cabin into the Antarctic snows, and then live in it alone through an entire winter - six months in temperatures of -60 F and below. In 1934, Byrd stocked the cabin, stored enough heating oil to keep his little stove going all winter long, and climbed down in. Every day, he made weather measurements and marveled at the stars. But the most interesting part is that, several months in, he thought he was going insane. He finally figured out that his oil stove was leaking and giving him carbon monoxide poisoning. He lived to tell the tale, and it’s a great one.
"Nothing can exceed the quiet splendor and freshness,
The fresh scent, the peace, the naturalness all around me,
In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests.
Kindling a fire, falling asleep on the gather’d leaves with my dog by my side,
I sleep—I sleep long—and over the past, oblivion.”
— Walt Whitman, excerpt from The Poet in Nature
More info at ganeshastove.com. Use code DISPATCH10 for 10% off.