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

trioxane

At home, I start my wet burn piles with a large can of WD40. I always have some in the jeep.

I have been meaning to test if/how the small bottle of CLP or Gun Butter that I sometimes bring with me when out shooting/camping can work as fire starter in emergencies. I carry them anyway when camping with firearms...

I'm reminded of an "old indian trick" taught to my buddy by a native amercian.
He would gather up whatever wood he could find. It matter not if it was dry or wet, nor what size it was.
After piling same, he'd open a can of 10 wt. chain saw oil and pour it over the wood. One match later and he always had a large, warm fire. But you did need to be up wind of the smoke.
All kidding aside. Having the ability to make a decent fire under tough conditions might save your life one day. That dead branches under the canopy technique saved my bacom many years ago. E

Good stuff, when it works. I've had foil packages of it that had small cracks and the stuff wouldn't light. I'd have a second source of firestarter.

That is experience talking! I think it is true to a certain extent everywhere and is the most often overlooked aspect of firebuilding. I don't know what world the "tinder to kindling" people are living in, but I know I've never been there. It always takes me a much more gradual progression of fuels with ample attention paid to building a good base of one size of fuel before trying to ladder up to the next one. All the different tinders I have tried work pretty well but none of them have been magic bullets that allowed me to ignore the real work of getting a fire to the self sustaining point.


For initial fire lighting, I carry 2" squares of bicycle inner tube. A single square will usually burn for about 3 minutes. That lets me carry a whole bunch of "starts" in a really compact and non-messy package. For backup, I carry trioxane. It's been a while since I've seen trioxane that wouldn't light as TAK mentions but I have seen it.

E:

I think that's called "Squaw Wood". The tiniest twigs make good tinder and the rest makes good kindling.

KC

Used to be called...

Squaw fish are now called pike minnows in BC, so the previously named wood will likely now be called something like Fairy Cellulose or maybe Pike Sticks.

Whatever its called, it is good stuff and usually available in western forests in some form or other.

I usually keep it in a zip lock or my first aid kit but I also take a film canister full of vaseline and another full of cotton balls. Between the 2 of them I've never had a problem getting the wetest of Alaska's wood burning.

Evan makes a good point. All to often I see people pay lots of attention to tinder only to watch their fire smolder and die. Some call survey peg size wood "kindling" and to me that is more of a sustainable burn size fuel once the fire is really going.

I use what I refer to as micro kindling. Fatwood if available or at least dry wood that is toothpick to match stick size in diameter. Then I progress up to pencil size, then to thumb size and so on. It takes one heck of a fire to throw big wood on and have it sustain.

The necessity of having an ax or splitting knife is that the dry wood may only be available well inside a standing dead tree or branch. Splitting tools also allows you to have small wood to feed the fire with. Especially in a wood stove, I like to add small wood with large wood for a more complete burn.

There is no magic bullet, but lots of practice in the worst conditions you can find will prepare you for when the fire might be a matter of surviving.

Carry a good fire kit and like Dan said, gather pitch balls, pitch wood etc as you travel so that when you get to camp at least some of the essential burning material is at hand.

That... That right there...

That's truth that only comes from experience.

It all boils down to one simple thing. Unless you have actually gone out into the area that you plan on playing in, and built some fires, everything you think you know is just a theory.

I take 3 ways to get it burning and an axe. I've never built a fire in a rainforest. But if you ever wanted to make a blaze in NW Montana, I might have some real working knowledge about that.

Old man beard works well as a tinder it is very available in the Northwest and is part of my backup to what I carry.
Birch bark as mentioned is also great , Birch has a fuel in the bark so to speak when burning it puts off a black smoke.
In my truck and ATV I always carry hand sanitizer.
Processing wood is always a factor so I always have a good solid fixed blade knife. For breaking down bigger wood if a saw is not with you you can break it down using the tree wrench method.

I am no kind of expert, but the night i made my above post i went out and made a fire using the advice I gave. Temp was mid 30s with a hard blowing wind carrying a light mist...
It had previously rained steadily for 24 hours, ending about 24 hours before my effort.

my 16 year old and I went back out last night and did it again... 14 degrees, light variable breeze, and all wood coated with frost or ice, from the freezing rain/snow storm of the day before.

on my first fire, a few nights ago, i got fire with the first strike of my swedish fire steel into the vaseline cotton ball...

last nights fire, we got sparks from the steel, but they weren't hot/forceful enough, with the attached scraper, to actually strike fire... I picked up my estwing sportsmans axe and scraped with it... one smooth scrape and a huge shower of hot sparks produced flame... it took a minute or so for the cotton ball to become fully fired, so iwaited and then added a parrafin/cotton ball and one strip of inner tube.

as the added cotton ball and rubber began to burn i added 3 matchwood twigs, all covered in frost. the damp started crackling immediately. i added matchwood 3 pieces at a time til i had some small hot coal built up and some fresh matchwood drying/burning on top.

then i added my first piece of frosty pencil wood. the matchwood burned down around it and i had to add more matchwood still to keep going.
at this point i added yet one more paraffin/cotton ball, and yet another pencil wood twig.

the jump to pencil wood is a major effort, if you've got damp wood. it was easier the first night because of the brisk wind. i was sheltering the fire with my body and only had to shift position to allow forceful ventilation.
the second night, the winds were very light and almost calm... i almost hyperventilated blowing on those matchwood coals to coax flame enough to ignite the pencil wood.

last night i probably used a half hat full of matchwood, and once i got the pencil wood going i had enough heat to cook a one pot meal. i left it there...

the first night i proceeded til i had some 1" or better sticks blazing, and could have easily built that fire bigger...

building a fire in less than good conditions is work... you gotta make your own conditions...

I believe it's easier to make a fire in the dark as i can better see what's going on, in the flames...
but making a spot for, and acquiring materials for your fire is best done in daylight...

Good post. Any wood that is frosty, damp or wet will need a good base fire to start combustion on bigger wood. Again if you have the ability to have a few pieces of fatwood anywhere from match size to pencil size it will produce a pretty intense inferno that will make the sustaining fire easier to maintain.

I have had a couple instances where I have shot an elk at below zero temperatures and the first thing I have done is get a hellacious fire going. One time I dragged a sizable pitchwood stump into the fire and then I had some intense heat that lasted for a long time.

i hit the post button before i was done... had to edit some more in...

and if you are lying on the ground making a fire or sheltering your fire from wind, anchor anything you're lying on to keep it out of the fire...

most areas around here are mixed deciduous and second growth scrub...

I'd love to run across some fatwood, but don't see it comong from cottonwood or maple which comprise the bulk of deadfall hereaboot...

This works well for me in harsh conditions.

And that is a voice of experience!

In parallel story, a friend of mine shot a whitetail at sundown in temps about-25 and dropping fast. A big fir deadfall lay where he took the shot and the intstant the deer hit the ground I started breaking limbs and building a fire. Easy in the cold dry conditions. I called to him to drag the deer to the fire and we gutted it there with a warming fire started BEFORE getting the first drop of liquid on hands.

I never got the point of the steel/spark thing, whats wrong with a bic lighter? And a spare if you're a worrier.

Strips of car inner tube rubber works well, put a bunch of cut up strips in your bag, burn well even if wet. If its raining or snowing start the fire inside a plastic supermarket bag, you know the ones you use to put your other stuff in your pack inside of. Then just let the bag burn up as well.
Like the posters said earlier, keeping a fire going properly is the main problem in wet difficult conditions, there is usually a lot of whittling going before a fire gets big enough to dry other sticks/wood.

I've had lots of lighters fail, even Bics. Never had a fire steel fail. Seldom need more than one strike to have fire. A fire steel never runs out of fuel and works when wet too.