Fieldcraft Fire from moist/damp wood

[john2000]

Thought I would share this, nothing revolutionary and it may very well be described in detail in other posts but it may be useful to some.

My wife and I live along a country backroad in the middle of basically nothing, a couple of small farms but other than that, just hills, mountains and forests all over.
We usually take the dog for a hike a few times a week, just a couple of hours or so, but occasionally in the weekends we pack a small ruck with hotdogs,burgers or other prepared food and take off for a day.
Living in a climate bordering from tempered to arctic, it can be difficult to find dry wood to build a fire from.
Last time we went out, it had been raining for a few days and even as it had started drying up, wood was still pretty much wet/moist.
The usual fire is the pyramid shape, but it will not work very well unless the wood is fairly dry, so when I started building my fire I used the method described below. My wife was very sceptical, both her and the dog were making fun of my strange "firemaking" skills,at least for a while

Ok, here goes;

Start out with gathering all the wood. This will keep you occupied and moving, so if you are a group let everybody participate and keep circulation up until you get the fire going.
Cut/break the wood into pieces of relatively even length,I use about a foot and a half length for a standard size camp fire (I dont want it burning forever as I prefer not leaving a campsite until it is all burned down, I dont like pouring water on half-burned wood and leave, it looks ugly and may flare up again).
Start out by laying down logs, about 3-4" thick, parallell to eachother and packed together about a fingers width apart, as wide as the logs are long forming a square.
Put the next layer on top of these but 90 degrees across.
Use thinner and thinner logs packing them tight together for each layer from the bottom two, untill the top layer that should be thin twigs about pencil thickness, try to find something as dry as possible, maybe twigs from a dead tree with "hard-dried" branches, for this.
Now you should have a cube about a foot and a half all sides, packed pretty dense.

At the center on top of this, build a little pyramid from thin twigs, dry grass, bark(preferrably birch), whatever you can find that will burn from your preferred metod of firestarting. This will be the "ignitor".
As you light up the thinner twigs and branches on top, it will burn hotter as the cold wood that would be around the ignitor in a regular pyraid fire now is below so it doesnt suck the energy out of it.
Heat will spread downwards as well, drying the layers below, and as glows fall down it will burn downwards at the center, spreading sideways eventually burning the entire stack.
When this is burning you can add more logs in a regular pyramid shape on top, and spend some time building another one next to it should the situation require it.

I recommend you try it out a few times to perfect your own technique as different types of wood and levels of moisture calls for different sizes of logs etc, and trying something for the first time when you`re in a shitty situation may not turn out very well...
The more time you spend laying it out the greater the chance of success, it may take half an hour or more to put this together but at least to me it has been worth it every time.

John - out

 

[CS223]

Re: Fire from moist/damp wood

To add to that, the driest wood is the dead wood still on the tree. Gather your kindling from the small dead branches.

Your technique is similar to the "Lincoln Log" method. Build a square on top of a wood "floor" alternating sticks log cabin style. Place your tinder & kindling in the center and light. The outer stack shields the fire from wind, keep feeding kindling and sticks, you can lay damp wood across the top to dry, continue as usual once established.

 

[crumpmd]

Re: Fire from moist/damp wood

Good advice.
I taught my scout troop to make a fire in the rain on our last campout. It rained the whole weekend. But we had fire. The boys, once shown where to look, will find mountains of good stuff to burn. Piney woods are abundantly stocked with flammables.

 

[HillbillyfromAL]

Re: Fire from moist/damp wood

Yeah good stuff man I refer to that as the lattice method. The only thing I do different it the arrangement of the logs. I put a good layer of the thick stuff on the bottom, next is 2-4 thiner layers with kindling inside there, then bigger stuff. That will really help when it is still raining as the kindling will have a bit more protection from the rain while you get it going, and the big ones on the bottom make some nice coals. It wouldn't matter if it wasn't raining at the time though.

 

[huntinggamo]

Re: Fire from moist/damp wood

+1

 

[kraigWY]

Re: Fire from moist/damp wood

Alaska is full of spruce trees. They all have dead branches protected by the greenery. Regardless how wet it is, its easy to get dry twigs from spruce trees.

When I lived up there I always carried a boy's ax (about a 18-20 inch handled hatchet). Unless wet wood has been laying in the creek, its gonna be dry inside. I split the wood to get at the dry stuff. That with the twigs mentioned about I never had any problem starting fires up there, no matter how wet it was.

I spent two weeks on Afognak Island. Rained the whole two weeks, drenched everything. Still, didn't have any problems starting fires.

I do the same thing here, if its raining I make my grand kids build fires just to show them how its done.

I've read Jack London's "To Build a Fire", aint gonna catch me like that.

 

[stefan73]

Re: Fire from moist/damp wood

I found that I like to put grass and stuff (if not carrying cotton balls or lint) in my cargo pocket to help dry. I had a learning lesson one time when I placed what I thought was relatively dry in a zip lock baggy which just retained the moisture. Best thing I seemd to notice was keep it away from rain but not locked in a plastic baggy. Me moving around along with my skin either generating heat or absorbing moisture (don't know which) helped to dry out the grass giving me the ability to start a fire with my flint striker.

 

[calebintn]

Re: Fire from moist/damp wood

Thanks for the tips