Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Backpack Hunting Fatwood???

I've found it before on accident. And pitch balls on scarred trees. But how do you go out, and find some on purpose? What do you look for and where?

Mark

I look for large dead pines that are still standing or leaning. Cut the main part of the tree down leaving about three feet of the trunk standing. Then cut the rest of the trunk down flush with the ground and look at the last couple of feet. It should be loaded with pitch and easy to split.

Used some yesterday to start a fire in my neighbor's brand new chimenea.

Old burns with standing tree stumps, used to cut the stumps for the fatwood when I was young. IIRC, the stumps were about 8-10 years old.

Also look for trees that have been long dead. The fat wood is concentrated in the roots and heart wood. Much of the fat wood I gather is from trees that burned in the 1910 fires. Sometimes the entire tree appears rotted, but will have a core of fat wood.

Very interesting, but sounds like a lot of work for a fire starter, no?

fatwood

Nice link. Really not much work at all. I gather pieces as I hike along. I have several wash tubs full st my cabin. I just carry a few split sticks with me.

An alternative to fat wood that my dad used was to soak old dry pine pieces in kerosene/diesel for weeks in a closed 1 gal. syrup can. When you need to start a fire, pull out a stick and light it up.

Some of the places I shed hunt this time of year have pines like Ed describe. Around here, when I find it, it's in the stump/taproot areas in Ponderosa, or Bull pine. Don't waste your time digging around in Larch or Firs.

However... Pines that grow in the southern regions, like Radiatta, have a MUCH higher level of resin in them. There's a noticeable difference between what I can find, and the Tindersticks that a guy can get from Light My Fire.

Pinus radiata is from the Monteray Penn. in California. The Southern pines are longleaf, slash, loblolly, and several others. The classic turpentine/pine tar pine is longleaf. That is what made Georgia the English navy all their ship masts.

We used to pickup pine knots when we walked the woods. They are rich with sap also and don't rot for years. They were used to mark property corners before modern survey markers. The rotted stump core from an old cut stump is where you will find fat wood in the wild.

Dan;
I trust this finds you well on this last day of 2013 sir.

We're a bit west of you and it's a little drier here too. I was interested to read your comparison of the pines you mine for fat wood as my experience has been exactly the opposite unless I misread you.

Here in the Okanagan the fat wood we get from Doug firs or larch seems to have a much higher level of resin than the Ponderosas in our yard.

We've live on 6 acres of mainly Ponderosa that the pine beetles are busy killing, so I get some fat wood from those trees. That said, I've found the Doug firs from about 5000' level typically have more resin and/or usable fat wood and prefer it.

I actually prefer larch for firewood, but seem to get more fat wood out of the Doug firs around here, though I could only guess as to why that might be.

As we heat with wood I cut the fat wood out of the firewood when I'm splitting it for curing. Anyway, like Ed I've ended up with boxes of fat wood and use it every day in winter to start the morning fire.

All the best to you in 2014 Dan.

Regards,
Dwayne

This^

It can be a joy on your saw too....

Interesting how areas differ even as close as Dan and I are. In my area, the doug fir has the highest resin content, of course most of it has been dead for over 100 years. Also find a lot in white bark and limber pines.

Fat wood is what I get when I see my wife's magnificent boobies.

I'll admit... I'm not the best at IDing stumps, especially rotten ones. The fatwood I've pulled out of the stumps that I knew were Douggies was pretty weak.

Larch I know pretty well, and there's a few stumps I got my eye on. Larch pitch I get all I ever want at work. I keep in touch with the logyard guys. When we have larch that got logged in the winter, and we have a 10 hour larch peel scheduled at work, you can scrape all you want off of a lathe knife with a putty knife at break time. Also, if you're caught up, and you see a butt-log get peeled, you can hang out at the chipper and grab any of that out of the belt that you want.

But still, I like the mexican stuff that Light My Fire puts in a box the best. It works better than anything that grows this far north.

Dwayne,

Which species of Larch you have up there? Eastern or Western? I know there's a band of Tamarack that runs through that region up into AK. (I used to [bleep] a forester, she knew a lot about all varieties of wood)

Thank you one and all. I hope that everyone is enjoying a pleasant New Years Eve.

I too love Tamarack/Larch for fire wood.

Mark

It's the same as what's known as heart pine down here. The old growth pines were virtually all heart pine, the stuff that grows now is all sapwood, it doesn't get old enough to form any heart pine before they cut it. My house was built in the late 1800's and the framing is all heart pine, you can still smell it plain as day when you go in the attic. God forbid it ever catches on fire

We pick it up in the woods from old rotted pine stumps, the outer part will rot away leaving the lightered stump as we call it. Pull it out, take it home & chop it up for fire starter. It's a bear to chop, hard as woodpecker lips.

Dan;
Happy New Year to you Dan!

Well thanks to you sir I learned something already this year by reading this link and a couple others.

http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/pubs/docs/en/en38.pdf

We live and hunt primarily in the relatively small band of Western Larch that they say runs east of Okanagan Lake and up only into the Shuswap Lake country.

I must admit I used the term larch and tamarack interchangeably Dan, which I see was wrong...

We cut mostly blow down trees for firewood and as mentioned for most of the wood I prefer larch or Doug fir for "night wood" and just this year have been learning the joys of some spruce to get a quick bed of coals for the slower burning chunks of larch or Doug fir.

Some of the Doug fir are so full of pitch that they'll stall my saw - a 372XPG with 28" of bar sticking out the front - but yes some of them are pitchy to the point where I'll quit cutting a log and come back to it a couple years later.

Those logs sometimes will have pitch seems bigger than a 2"x 4" running for up to 6' in them. Admittedly though there are times when the pitch seem produces just crystallized pitch in the center with fatwood surrounding it.

The crystallized pitch will burn too, but isn't as handy to carry along in the pack and seems to ignite better with a flame and not with a spark from a ferro rod.

That's all I know this morning on that subject Dan - thanks again for making me dig a bit and learn something already in 2014!

All the best to you in 2014 Dan.

Regards,
Dwayne

Fellow 'Fire members and makers;
On the fatwood theme, I thought I'd snap a couple quick photos of some fatwood in process so to speak.

Here's a shot of how I do it nowadays - a tip of the hat here goes to Okanagan as he's showed me a better way to slice the fatwood chunks in a thread here.



The slightly wider x thinner pieces - 3/4" x 1/8" - that I now use are easier to break in half if starting with a flame and as well are easier to make "fatwood shavings" with if starting with a ferro rod.

This is a shot of the old method I was using which resulted in pieces that were more like 1/2" x 1/2". Still usable to be sure, but less handy for both breaking apart and making shavings for a ferro rod start.


It's a good time of year to split off fatwood and play with new techniques of fire starting I find. As an added bonus it makes the garage - and my good wife's car - smell like fatwood rather than meat since we cut meat in there too.

Anyway, hopefully that was some use to somebody out there this first morning of 2014. All the best to you all this year.

Regards,
Dwayne

That settles it. I'm going to tear up rotten stumps with an axe tomorrow.


Larch is an interesting wood to me. It's not really a softwood, and it's not really a hardwood. To give you an idea of it's density, compared to Doug Fir, a 1/10" thick 4x8 sheet of larch weighs the same as a 1/7" thick piece of fir. That's with 2-8% moisture left in the veneer.

and I didn't even know there was an Alpine Larch. Never even heard of it