Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Backpack Hunting tinkering with fire starting materials & techniques

Great pics! Birchbark is wonderful stuff and the paper kind peeled out like you found is the best. Birch was common where I used to live in the Interior of BC. I am pleasantly surprised that you could light it directly with the fire steel. Y'all are convincing me to go back and buy a V2.0

Here's a pic of a grandson roasting a hot dog for lunch on a minimal fire in late November along a coastal river. We were meandering back roads, looking at spawning salmon, practicing fire building, etc. It had been raining or snowing and melting for three weeks, with some soggy snow still around and was raining at the time. The driest squaw wood we could find is propped up almost over the small flame drying. We used more fatwood than usual to get something going, and split up larger dead wood with an axe to get past sodden wood to merely damp stuff. The creek behind him is full of spawning coho and chum.