Not everyone has the time or inclination to practice their fire making skills. But it is possible that anyone might have to make a fire in less than ideal situations as was demonstrated by the unfortunate lady I talked about in the first fire log. So what would you put together in a kit to give someone with little or no experience the maximum ability to start a fire in bad conditions while still being small and compact?

I had my theories on this subject based on what I imagined would give a rookie the most difficulty and how to overcome that. But I wanted to see what a real rookie would do when confronted with making a fire in less than ideal conditions. So I recruited the “Bad Girl” (my nickname for my youngest sister) as my semi-willing victim and set out to find out what it was like for a real life rookie to start a fire.

Since I was trying to be mindful of her time and keep total time I was dragging her away from her books to be around an hour, I figured I would gather all the wood needed for her to start the fire. I was focused on finding out what tools and tinders would be the easiest for her to use and so I did not want to waste her good will by having her tramp around looking for wood. As it turns out, my focus was misplaced.

Conditions: Temp was about 24 degrees. It was cloudy without much wind. A couple of inches of light powdery snow covered everything. The ground in the area of the fire was pretty frozen but further afield it was muddy in places where flowing water coming from the hill was keeping the ground soft. Since she was not getting wood, this did not impact her much.

Test: “Bad Girl” makes fire with low quality wood without instructions (semi-success?) and “Bad Girl” makes fire with low quality wood with instructions (success for sure).

Equipment: Armageddon Ferro Rod, Zippo matches, BIC Lighter, Cotton Balls, and Esbit solid fuel cubes are the only things she used. I had other sources of tinder available to her but she did not use them. All the equipment and tinder I have described (and used) in earlier tests except the solid fuel cubes. I might go into more detail on them in the future but if you follow the link they are pretty self explanatory.

“Bad Girl’s” Qualifications As A Rookie:

“Bad Girl” had never started a fire outdoors prior to this test even though she is in her early twenties. She had started fires inside a wood stove before so she was not a complete novice to fire. She had read up to Fire Log #4 before she got bored of them and I imagine that she has read or seen other things on making fire as well. So she was not as a complete of a rookie as someone who grew up in the city, never went camping, and never read anything on the subject. But I think it is fair to categorize her as a rookie for the purpose of this test.

Narrative for the Test:

I brought her to the location that “Fire Log 6” occurred. The extra kindling that I had gathered but never got to use was still laying on the ground there. Since that time it had been rained and snowed on but it still had the fine twigs and it was not punky so it did not absorb water like wood that has been on the ground a long time. I figured this kindling would strike a nice balance between being a challenge but not setting her up for failure.

While I went off to gather some dry kindling she started working on a fire lay (my original plan had been to teach her to use a ferro rod on dry wood after she successful started a fire on her own. I had presumed she would wind up using either matches or a lighter in conjunction with a tinder). I was pleased that she was working so studiously on that as I have been told the biggest mistake rookies almost always make is not spending enough time on prep work (readers of last week’s fire log will know that I made the same mistake when pressed for time and likely will again sometime in the future). But when I was done gathering the kindling I thought would be needed for the next fire I came back I saw this as the fire lay….

If you blow up the above picture you will see that she put a lot of effort into making sure there was maximum airflow between all her wood. Her effort went into stacking wood just so and she broke a few twigs into itty bitty pieces. But she mixed up her kindling sizes all together preventing a proper fire ladder and she did not prepare nearly enough kindling to get a fire going given the quality of the wood she would be using. And worst of all, she put her tinder on top of her fire lay so all the heat from it would go up into the air instead of drying out her kindling.

Actually, the first time she tried lighting a fire, she did not use tinder. The picture above is after she had tried a couple of time to light her fire lay. Much to my surprise, the first thing she wanted to try for her first ever fire starting outdoors was the ferro rod. I had intended to print out the directions that came with the ferro rod (I lost the original but I think they can be found on the company’s website) but between one thing and another I had neglected to do so. Honestly, I thought she would use either a lighter or matches for her first fire which is why I was planning on doing a second fire so that I could see how hard it would be to teach her how to use a ferro rod.

But since she wanted to start with the ferro rod and I failed to bring the instructions that came with the device, I broke my no instructions rule and give her a quick demonstration on how it worked. She took to the ferro rod like a duck takes to water. She was throwing a lot of sparks from the get go and made an effort to start her fire lay with sparks alone. But she quickly figured out that sparks alone were not going to do the trick and got a cotton ball out. At first that would not light for her but then she realized she needed to open it up to expose the cotton strands (I think I snapped the above picture just after she had done that).

The tinder lit right up for after she did that and she worked hard blowing to try to make that fire spread as you can see in the below picture. But since her tinder was on top of her fire lay, it never had a chance.

After that attempt had failed she regressed backwards in terms of technique. She tore a cotton ball into little pieces and placed the pieces in various spots on her fire lay. Then she tried to light the various pieces hoping that her fire would spread through her fire lay that way but this only served to dissipate her starting heat and ensure she could not start combustion.

Next she tried matches. She seem to figure out the Zippo match container and the matches intuitively (I had thought she might need to look at the instructions to find the strike pad but she had no need for that) but she could not get even the massive Zippo typhoon matches to start her fire. Some twigs would catch and she tried to move them around to start other things on fire but no dice because her fire lay prevented a proper fire ladder.

I could tell she was starting to get discouraged and it was now 45 minutes into the hour that I had planned to use up of her time so I encouraged her to get the lighter out to use the Esbit tablets (I had told her to save them for last because I saw them as being the fool proof option and did not want it to be too easy). But when she got out the lighter she found that she could not get it to light. At first I thought she was not depressing the lever or something but then it dawned on me that the lighter had been laying out this entire time and was now cold. With repeated efforts she got an anemic flame out of it and tried to use that to start the Esbit tablet. But that did not seem to be working for her so I got out the one in my coat out as it was still warm. With that she was easily able to set the Esbit tablet on fire.

She was still fixated on placing her tinder on top of her fire lay but the Esbit tablet had enough energy to burn itself down into the center of her fire lay. Once it got down there, it produced enough heat to start even her mix bag of excessively spaced out kindling on fire. But due to the fact that there was not a lot of kindling and because it was so spaced out, the fire would not get hot even after it got going.

Since it was not very hot and the fuel tab was about spent at the point of the below picture, I decided to use the dry fire wood to get it built up into a success. I was afraid it was not hot enough to climb up the fire ladder with if wet or damp wood was used to feed it at this stage of the game.

By this point, I had already had her out for over an hour and I had used up the dry kindling that I intended to teach her to use a ferro rod with building her first fire into something that was a little more successful. But it was apparent to me that she had no difficulty with the mechanical act of using the ferro rod and I did not want to her to end the day without having the chance to be more successful. So I figured I would show her how to make a fire lay with the same crappy wood she had been struggling with that would work with just a ferro rod and a cotton ball.

So I explained to her the concept of the fire ladder and how to break down her kindling. I had her build a solid base out of some of thicker branches to put her cotton ball on and explained that you need to break open the cotton ball to expose the thin strands of cotton for to catch a spark easy (really she had figured that part out already). I tried to explain how to improve her ferro rod technique but I think I only confused her. She had no problem lighting cotton balls using her spray and pray method and honestly I don’t worry about using technique when using cotton balls either. The need to be more focused and precise only becomes apparent when you are trying to use more finicky natural tinders. When all was said and done, she created the fire in the picture below in about 15 minutes.

I was satisfied. I told her she was all done now as I knew I had dragged this along for longer than originally planned. She expressed that it would be hard for a fire like that to warm her up very much and I explained that was now plenty hot enough to feed crappy wood into and turn into a bigger fire if this was for real (it may not a look a lot bigger then her first attempt in the picture but that is because I am further away from it and the wood is a lot denser then the spaced out way she set up the first fire). I don’t know if it was because she did not believe me or because she just wanted to satisfaction of actually accomplishing it because she went off and started gathering fire wood from around the area to make it into a fire that would actually warm her.

In the end, she turned her fire into this….

Lessons Learned:

1. My focus on what method of fire starting equipment was easiest to use for a rookie was mistaken. It appears that knowing how to build a fire is a far bigger issue then the relatively minor differences in difficulty between the various devices. How to address that issue with people don’t have time to practice is an interesting question. In retrospect, I should have tested how well written directions enabled a rookie to get a fire going in bad conditions
2. Notwithstanding the above, it appears that BIC lighters are treacherous things for a rookie to rely on in emergency. I am pretty sure that she would have gotten it going eventually had it been a real emergency, but the BIC lighter give her most trouble of anything due to the cold. Admittedly this only confirms existing prejudices on my part. It is relatively easy to warm a cold lighter up if you are experienced enough to recognize that is the problem, but that does not fix the fact that they lose all their fuel if you are not careful or they can be smashed by heavy objects fairly easily.
3. Based on this test, I would say that the matches were the easiest thing for her to use. But given my experience with her, I would not hastate to put a ferro rod in a kit for a rookie as long as tinder that easily took a spark went with it. She had no problem using the ferro rod and lot less can go wrong with a ferro rod in transit or storage compared to a BIC lighter or matches.
4. I think Esbit tablets are good thing to put in a rookie fire lighting kit for emergencies but sadly they are not quite fool proof. I think they are 90% of the way there though. They certainly are able to make up for a lot of errors of technique but they can’t quite do it all.