How to Light a Fire in the Wet
Today, I'm in Central Washington in this beautiful pine and oak forest. I will just talk to you a little bit about fire lighting in extremely wet conditions. I was here a few weeks ago and there was three feet of snow but since then it has been raining and everything is starting to thaw and the ground is just completely soak. Everything is really wet and if you're not familiar with this type of environment you might think we’re in nightmare to get a fire started on a daylight today.
But if you apply a little Bushcraft it’s actually one of the easiest fires you’ll ever start. It is so easy in fact. I’m going to show you how to do it if you didn’t even have a cutting tool. So the first thing to do is collect the driest wood that you can and in this case it’s going to be this. My friend in the forest service calls this fire lighters because when a fire starts these are dead dry and they catch on fire and the fire shoots right up into the top of the tree.
So we’re going to use this today to get our fire started and you could see when they break they’re just dead dry. They snap like that so this is going to be perfect for all we need. I'm going to collect the whole bunch of them. This next piece here that we’re looking for is called pine pitch. Pine trees produce pitch like this when they are attacked by insects or by disease. They produce much more of it than they actually need and the remainder of it oozes out of the tree like this and we’re going to collect some of this branch to get our fire started because once this stuff catches light it just forms this fiery goodie that really spreads the fire even to wood that is a little wet.
The last thing I need is something that’s going to burn long enough to get my pine pitch to catch fire and this dead pine needles right here that are still on the tree again nothing touching the ground because they then will be too wet but this stuff is still on the tree here. It’s going to be just perfect. We’re going to go ahead and put our fire lit together now. I have those fire lighter branches that we collected earlier forming a base. There are pine needles on top and on top of that I'm going to put my pine pitch and on top of that I'm going to go ahead and put some more wood.
Now you're probably thinking what is he doing? These branches are way too thick to get a fire started and usually if you're right we’d start with tinder and small kindling and we go ahead and start with bigger kindling until we are able to add fuel. But with this pine pitch you can bypass all that and go right to fuel. That is what I'm going to show you today. Here, we just have a striking match here and I'm going to set it in these pine needles by the pitch. We’re going to get this started.
Okay and there we go. Those pine needles are long gone but I hope you can see that dripping flame down there at the bottom. That is the pine pitch and again it’s just covering all of that wood beginning our fire going. It doesn’t get much easier to start a fire than this in any weather when we got this one goal without any steel tools at all. But we’ve had a knife or an axe, it would have been that much easier.
So I hope you enjoyed and might have learned a tip or two. Please visit our website at BushcraftNorthwest.com for more Bushcraft articles, videos and information. Thank you very much.
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