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

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.

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!