When I first started doing these fire logs in the beginning of the year, I said….

“I intend to do one fire a week from the start of January through the end of March. I am not trying to teach myself anything exotic but rather to see how well what I “know” and what I have carries over to fire starting in winter weather. The goal is to try something new either in terms of conditions or in terms of equipment used every week.”

I was reasonably successful in this goal. Once we got into March, I had a harder and harder time finding time to write up the results of what I did, but technically that was not part of the goal. For almost all of the fires, I was able to spin them as some kind of success even if some of them were pretty lame. Only Fire Log #13 was a complete failure.

I had planned for this to end with March in part because I knew I would be getting busier around then. As that is indeed the case (in fact, most of this was written in the first week of April but I am only now finding the time to put it up) I am going to try to do a briefer then normal overview of the fires that I have not already covered to close out this series of experiments.

Fire Log #12

For this fire, I wanted to do some feather sticks. To me, the appeals of feather sticks is that if you can make them properly, you should be able to start a fire with a ferro rod just about anywhere without needing to find the “right” natural tinder (such as birch bark or milkweed pods). For this particular fire, I used both a saw and fixed blades (I tried two separate ones) and my best ferro rod.

I had this idea that I could not use evergreen branch as they would not be long enough without having knots. But I could not find any branches that I thought would work in a timely manner so I decided to settle for making shavings off of dead evergreen branches.

To get as dry as possible savings, I sawed a larger dead branch off of one of the evergreens and batoned it down into four pieces and made the shavings off of that. I found making feathers sticks off of these batoned pieces too difficult as I kept cutting the shavings off by accident. Since was already primed to believed that would be the case, I accepted that and just saved up all the shavings to start a fire with.

As I made shavings I periodically would check with my ferro rod to see if I could get them to light. Occasionally they would catch for a little bit but I could not keep them going. After awhile, it became obvious that I had more than enough shavings to start a fire and I was going to have to do something different. So I took the smaller of my two fixed blade knifes and using the tip I made some real fine shavings from wood that was red due to the resin in it. Those I was able to catch fire and they in turn caught the rest of the shavings on fire. From there, I was able to build a sustainable fire.

Total time was about 1 hours and 4 minutes so it was not a fast way to start a fire. But I was happy to have started a fire via a means that I could find just about anywhere as long as I had the right tools.

From this particular experiment, I learned two things. The first is that the shavings have to be extremely fine for a ferro rod to catch them and the second is that it is easier to make those shavings with a thinner and lighter blade.

Fire Log #13

After I did the above test, I saw this video on making feather sticks. It made me think that I had wrongly written off making feather sticks out of evergreen branches.

After having seen that video, I wanted to give the feather sticks another try. But in order to make it something different, I decided to do it with just my pocket knife and my little Wazoo Ferro Rod.

The first major problem I ran into was that the ground was so wet and muddy that I need not want to kneel to work on things. But my back was periodically giving me stabbing pains as I tried to squat. Finding a good way to work was a real challenge.

The second issue I had was that my pocket knife was nowhere near as good at making feathers as my fixed blade knifes were. Part of this might have been due to the fact that my pocket knife was not quite as sharp but thing I really noticed is the handle. Both in terms of comfort and in terms of leverage, you are far better off with the handle on a typical fixed blade knife. When doing typical light cutting tasks, the draw backs of the handle on a pocket knife are not noticeable. But when you try to do some real cutting work with a pocket knife, the draw backs with the handle vs a fix blade knife is very noticeable. This is true even if the pocket knife and the fixed blade knife have the same blade length.

In spite of these problems, I did get a pile of shavings that I thought would light. And I did get them to light a couple of times by really abusing my little ferro road. But I could not get this fire to sustain itself. After an hour and 15 minutes, I gave up and burned everything with a cotton ball tinder.

I am not sure why I failed on this one. It could be because I did not baton my wood that most of my shavings still had too much moisture in them. It could be because I could not get at the really red resin filled wood without a saw and maybe that is what had helped the last time. The one thing I am pretty sure of is that it was not fault of the wazoo fero rod as I got flame to start that lasted for a while. If everything else had been prepared to receive the fire, it should have spread to the rest of the kindling. But for some reason it just did not want to spread.

If my back had not been bothering me maybe I would have figure it out. But the way it was going, I was afraid it was going to give out on me and I did not want to keep pushing it after over an hour.

Fire Log #14

For my last fire in this series of experiments, I choose to make a fire with a wallet sized Fresnel Lens and some left over charred punk wood that I made in the course I took last summer.

Now a Fresnel Lens is not really a practical way of making a fire in the winter months around here. First, it requires sun, which we almost never have especially when we need to make a fire. Second, it is really fussy about what you use as tinder and something that is fussy and winter time don’t really go together well. You can take stuff with you that makes starting a fire with it pretty easy (hence the charred punk wood) but by the time you do all that the idea that you can start a fire with “something that you can carry in your wallet” has turned into, “If you have to bring all that, why don’t you pick something more reliable?”

However, there are strong similarities between starting a fire with a Fresnel Lens and starting a fire with flint and steel if you used char for both. And since one day I hope to learn how start a fire with flint and steel using a Fresnel Lens seemed like a good first step to seeing how hard it would be to start a fire with flint and steel in these conditions. Using either a Fresnel Lens or flint and steel it is easy to get a burning ember in char (which is why char it is part of the traditional flint and steel kit). What is harder is getting that ember into a flame using found materials when everything is wet and snow covered.

When I tried it, there was still recent snow from the night before in all the shady spots. Where there was sun, it was all melted off but everything was still really wet. I made a bundle out of weed seed heads that I have made before for natural tinder ferro rod fires. These weeds are not good enough to take a spark from a ferro rod when wet but I was hoping they would take an ember from charred punk wood as I did not (and do not) know what else would work that is readily found on my property.

My first attempt to get this bundle of weeds to light failed, but my second attempt with a bigger piece of char worked. I failed to time myself, but it all went better then I feared albeit a lot slower than the people on youtube who use bundles of nice dry bark or jute. See below video as an example…..

Looking back on all the fire logs:

When I started these fire logs I had certain ideas of what I was going to achieve. On the whole, I was successful. I started fires using only natural tinders in tough conditions (i.e. everything soaked or snow covered). I tried some equipment that I had but had never used before. I had lots of practice and noticed an improvement in my own ability to start fires. I had thought I would start a fire in really cold conditions or that I would do more practical things with the fire but those things never happened. We never had really cold temperatures this winter and I lacked the time to do as much with the fires as I would have liked. On the other hand, I did do some things that I was not expecting to do. The most notable of those was teaching other people to make fires in bad conditions.

None of the lessons that I learned from doing these experiments was earth shattering and everything that I did learn has been stated countless times by others. But some of these lessons are argued about on line and I now feel a little more confident that my opinion on those controversial points. In my view, most important things that I learned are as follows…..

1. Ferro rods are worth having: I have seen it argued many a times that ferro rods are really just gimmicks. The argument goes that they are too hard to use and if you want a back up fire starter you should just take another lighter. These arguments are usually advanced by older outdoorsmen whose formative years were spent before ferro rods really became a thing or ultra light backpackers who believe in efficiency and “expert” advice. I sometimes wondered if these lines of argument has some validity but now I really don’t think anything about these arguments are correct. The past few months have shown how lighters are always looking for an excuse to fail in cold weather and that it is really easy to teach people with no experience to quickly build a fire with ferro rods. A ferro rod is cheap insurance and if you ever venture further than a mile out of civilization you should have one and know how to use it. You might want to have one even if you are just concerned about supply chain disruptions and how you will start wood stoves in such situations.
2. You should always carry a source of emergency tinder: This is one thing I was taught in class and I thought I understood but did not really understand until these past few months. In the past, I thought of as carrying emergency tinder as being like the cherry on top. Nice to have but the critical thing was having a fire starter. But experience lighting fires in bad conditions have taught me just how critical having emergency tinder is to getting a fast reliable fire in bad conditions. Now I think of fire starter without emergency tinder as being like a car with bald tires in the winter time. Sure you can make it work but it takes a lot more skill and you sure as heck don’t want to rely on it when you have a true emergency that requires speed.
3. If you don’t try, you don’t know: I think there are a lot of people out there who think that they know how to start a fire in bad conditions but don’t really. I think there are a lot of other people who think that starting a fire in bad conditions is an exotic skill that they don’t have time master. As a result of working with other people over the course of these lessons, I learned that it is easy to teach people how to start a fire in bad conditions and it takes very little time but most often it is a skill that needs to be learned. If you are one of those people who have never started a fire in bad conditions, take an hour of time sometime when everything is soaking wet to start a fire just to make sure you are not one of those who only think they could start a fire. It will not take a big investment of time and honestly it is a lot of fun.

And that last point was the biggest surprise to me. When I started this I did not expect to enjoy it. In the past I have never enjoyed the process of starting fires. It was always just a chore that needed to be done whether it was lighting a wood stove or a brush pile. When doing it in class during the summer as part of learning “wilderness skills” it was so easy as to be boring (thought in retrospect I might have learned more than I thought). So I thought that making myself do it in bad conditions was going to be boring and miserable and I only started this process with the goal of self improvement. But as it turned out, I found that doing it in bad conditions under various constraints to be a lot of fun and I miss doing it already.