Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Backpack Hunting Surviving a cold wet night

I agree with David_Walter that this thread is a classic and has lot of info - and the info added by Trystan is yet anther example of this!

Many years ago I took a winter survival course, and one thing I remember is that for the "make a fire" section of the course, participants had to hold their hands in a bucket filled with water and ice - and then make a fire.

I forget how many minutes this had to be - but at the time is seemed like a bloody long while!

Of course many here are from fairly warm climes and having hands chilled in ice isn't particularly relevant.

I will just note, however, that many of the fire-making methods mentioned in this thread are just not practical with extremely cold,numb hands (e.g. 9 volt battery + steel wool, matches (dipped in wax or not, you can't hold the bloody things properly when you can't feel your hands, Bic, Zippo or Ronson lighters - very difficult to get the wheel to spin and create sparks).

I recall that one of the participants on the winter survival course had a LARGE, piezo-electric cigar lighter that almost everybody in the course could use effectively after the ice bucket hand treatment.

I also recall that participants had lots of different fire steels (ferro rods) and that there were big differences both in the ferro rods, and their strikers. The Swedish Firesteel put out a LOT of sparks LINK to Light My Fire USA