Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Firewood: What variety do you like best?

We’re wood heat only, and on year three of liquid amber from a neighbor tree that was taken down. Pretty nice compared to lodgepole.

Yes on the mesquite. It will really screw up your pipes. And I really don’t care for it for smoking. For grilling coals its the bee’s knees! Like for grillin’ steaks.

It do burn hot! I buckled up one of those cheap Sears& Roebuck Franklin stoves with mesquite. But when it’s all you got, you burn it.

White oak is the wood of choice here. One thing better than free wood is getting paid good money to take it. During the course of the year I run into enough oak jobs that I can be pretty picky on what goes into my stove. I give my neighbors what I don't want and stay 3 years ahead on my personal firewood. At this point in my life tree work is pure entertainment.

WS

I've been feeding my woodstove for 42 years. My 100+ acres is a mixture of Red and Chestnut Oak, Hickory, Ash, and Cherry. Our Elm all died out probably 35 years ago, and now Ash is fading fast due to the Emerald Borers. Funny...here in the Northeast we would never consider burning softwoods like Pine, Hemlock, or Cedar, but when I travel out west to hunt, that's all they burn out there. You use what you have, I guess.

It's sorta like makin' hay.

Doug Fir as kindling, Pacific Madrone (about 31,000 MMbtu per cord) for real heat. We heat only with wood although we do have a heat pump. We use about 4 cords of madrone per year. It all comes off our property so we don't have to go far.

Look here for the BTU rates for Eastern and Western hard woods and soft woods. Also lists pounds per dry cord. https://worldforestindustries.com/forest-biofuel/firewood/firewood-btu-ratings/

Water Oak and red Oak. I've got several Sawtooth oaks that I'm not going to cut anytime soon, but they keep me in shed branches for kindling

I’m a big fan of the electric heat pump. My old man preferred White Oak. Hickory popped and burned holes in the carpet. He always liked to cut his wood in the hottest part of summer. Said he liked it to “season” for a few months before burning.

The shipping gets a little high, so we burn local.

Locust for the furnace, oak for the fireplace

Pinon and cedar

Here's a look out the gate 75 yards from my backdoor, that opens onto square miles of public land. Not a single hardwood that I know of out there, and I've covered most of that ground to the top of the first ridge. Second ridge is over the fence on private land. Over to the right, on top of that ridge, you can see a few ponderosa pines sticking up. There's one dead center of the pic that's hard to make out, just a dark spot in amongst the other trees. The rest is all juniper.



This is what it looks like close up. The buck is bedded a hundred yards or so to the west (right) of that little road in the first pic, under that second larger tree in the "foreground". Every tree there is a juniper



Nearest oaks I know of are about 15 miles over that ridge in the first pic to the SW where they get a bit more moisture than we get here.

Believe me, if there was a hardwood around here, the first settlers would have burned it up or used it for wagon boards or something long ago...............if the local Indians hadn't done so already.

We can grow the scheidt out of juniper here though!

We burn about 15 face cord a year. Lots of ash right now because its everywhere, but I love hard maple and white oak too. We also have a couple types of hickory here on the place. One thing I didn't see mentioned is Hop Hornbean. It's part of the birch family but I'd say it burns more like beech. Splits about as hard too. I cut up every dead one I can find and mix it in with the rest.

I WISH we had a good supply of hedge around here. I've burned some that I got from a farmer pulling an old hedgerow and people are right, it burns like coal.

Hickory is my 1st choice, standing dead oak and honey locust are good too. Hedge is the hottest firewood in the midwest and should be used sparingly in old flues and stoves. I cut up a blowdown Pecan for a friend several years ago amd that was the sweetest smelling wood ever.

I'm 66 and still sawing and splitting 4-5 cords a year by hand.



Somebody above posted a pic of the Fiskars 8 pound splitting maul and it's the best one I've ever used.

got to burn what's available, but there's areas of the country that have really [bleep] wood for heat purposes..

What ever wood pallets are made of.

Is that one of those elusive Modoc stump deer in the second photo?

I love that N CAL/N NV country!

Those are too valuable for building chicken Gulags and compost bins around here.

Juniper is more readily available.

Geno, I will trade you backyards.

Title of the pic has me calling him "bent rack buck" that season. I didn't see him around this past summer, but there's a good chance the bent rack was from him bumping it when it was in velvet that summer. Probably growing in straight now if he's still alive. 2018 picture.