Fire Walking

During a fire-walking event, you almost always see a large, glowing bed of burning coals. The bed may be 10 feet long or so. And the glowing coals are real. People actually do walk across the red-hot coals in bare feet.

The trick comes from the weird physics of the coals themselves. Think about this. Let's say you took a 10-foot long iron plate and heated it up red-hot with blow torches. Now you walk across that. What would happen? Walking across a red-hot metal plate would be insane. Imagine a hamburger patty when it hits a hot iron skillet. Now think about your bare feet being the hamburger! Bare feet on red-hot metal would give you third-degree burns in milliseconds. So what is going on? There are a couple of things to notice about any fire-walking event:

1. Firewalkers are not actually firewalkers. They are really coal walkers. Someone lights the fire well ahead of time to allow the wood to burn down to non-flaming coals.
2. The event is always held at night. If it were done during daylight, the bed of coals would look instead like a bed of ashes. There is always a layer of ash covering the coals. By doing it at night, the glowing red light is still visible through this layer of ash.
3. The firewalker never dawdles. No self-respecting firewalker would run across the coals -- that would be undignified. But firewalkers certainly are walking briskly. You never see firewalkers just standing around on the coals.