I'll be on the lookout when I start a new character (which will be after the next update). However, for my last character the fire was lit in the "sauna" stove, she went to the trap fence about 3 tiles away, walked around the single tile lake inside the fence, and returned back to to make a stew on the embers that were MIA. The stove was lit with the minimum number of branches.
There wasn't enough items around for an item overflow explanation, and I don't think tracks were removed either (I've never actually seen an item overflow warning, apart from the one for loading watercraft, animals/companions of burden, and the character with items, but that's a different one).
I'm fairly convinced it is a timing issue where the fire has to be in some specific phase when the day (and possibly month/season) ticks over. I'm not convinced the character has to be away, as I believe my character was doing some kind of crafting to pass the time the first time I encountered it, but cannot rule out that the character has to be absent from the tile.
A problem from a fault finding perspective is that the player has a rather hazy notion of what time it is, so it's hard to time the setting of a fire to a precise time (and there's no precise way of passing time to reach the desired time should we be able to identify it. At a guess, a large fire with a large burn time may be easier, if the condition is just that the fire is burning at the cross over time).