07/22/2022
Food, water, fire, and shelter. The four main elements of survival. w
Whether you are in the wild, on the move, or sheltering in place in your home in a city, suburb, or rural area, you're going to need fire to cook with, and keep you warm in colder temperatures.
Tinder, kindling, and fuel selection is important. In most cases, dried grass, paper, dead leaves and pine needles, thistle down, cat tail seeds (when they're past ripeness to eat and are popping into the cottony fluff) are excellent examples of tinder to start and catch a spark toget t he fire going. A hndy plastic bag, ideally zip-lock, is great to gather and store the tinder in.
Dry twigs, and small branches are next to feed the inital fire, you want to take a handfull of the tinder, with the finest tinder in the middle, the coarser stuff to the outside, like a little nest, and nestle it in the bundle of your twigs, so the small flame has soomething to feed on. Pine bark is excellent for this, as it has lots of pine resin that is flammable and will burn hot and hold a flame longer than the tinder. The idea is, to build it up to a sustainable flame, that you can feed with the larger materials for sustained fire that willl put out plenty of heat from your campfire pit, Dakota Fire Hole or even a portable wood camping stove. We will discuss these different methods for containing the fire and making use of them in a different article later.
Your fuel is next, this can be larger dead branches a bit larger in diameter than your thumb, to wrist size. Dead wood is usually pretty dry, though the bark can be damp and rotten, so you will need to peel that off. If the outside of the wood is wet, take a fixed blade knife, such as a Ka-Bar, and "baton" the blade through it, to split the wood and expose the dry interior. You can do this even with fairly large logs, with a little practice. You can also baton through the smaller limbs to cut them into managable lengths, suitable for your setup and to make it easier to store close to your fire to keep it fed. Put the fuel in a dry spot out of the rain/snow so it stays dry, this can be done in the open with a smalll waterproof tarp, or a plastic sheet. If you're going to be in one place for a good while, you can do this in advance to supply yourself with fuel for several days. Things are obviously going to be easier if you have companions/family to help gather and prepare things, and having better tools at your disposal like axes and saws/chainsaw will help immensely, but for focus right now, thiink on the scale that it is you alone against the elements. Scaling up from this level is simple.
There are dozens of ways to start a fire, some more effective than others for the beginner. The use of a magnifying glass for example, or even a bottle of water, to focus the sun's rays is very effective at lighting tinder on fire, to create a spark to nurture into a flame. This of course, can take a bit of time, and reuires strong sunlight so its pretty useless at night. Butane or zippo lighters are great as long as they have fuel, but the important part is the tiny ferro-rod (the "flint") that grinds against the abrasive wheel. It is possible to start dry tinder on fire with this alone. I couold go on about multiple ways to start a fire with more primitive methods, like a bow drill, or other friction methods, but that will be touched on again later in another article.
Back to ferro-rods, there are obviously many sizes and styles you can get to use for starting a fire, but here's a trick you can use to make it even mor effective. Slowly scrape bits of the rod off into a pile, shaving it a bit essentially, and put that into the middle of your tinder, before you use the ferro-rod to shower it with sparks. It will usually start the tinder the first time! Sure, you can try to do it by striking multipletimes, but with a decently sharp blade, yyou can shave off the rod material by gently scraping, and it will ignite almost explosively when the spark hits it! There are also self contained "forever matches", that are lke a tiny ferro-rod and wick with lighter fluid inside the container, usually good for hundreds of uses before you need to put more lighter fluid into the small container. Small enough to tuck just about anywhere, and great if you're injured and have only one hand to work with, or even for the complete novice to use. Best of all, they don't have to be stored in a dry container like matches, but work effectively the same way.
I hope this article was helpful to you, if it was feel free to comment below, or if yoou have questions, please feel free to comment! Thank you!
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