Off The Grid Living…The City Slicker’s Guide to Bushcraft Methods: Fire and Water

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The City Slicker’s Guide to Bushcraft Methods: Fire and Water

Written by: Mike Extreme Survival, How-To

Making fire and sanitizing water are perhaps your most important skills to utilize in the wild. Coming straight out of the U.S. Army Field Manual 21-76, your survival depends upon the “rule of 3’s.”
You can survive three minutes without air (this shouldn’t be a problem in the woods, as oxygen is rather abundant). You can survive for three hours in the cold without shelter. You can survive for three days without water. Finally, you can survive for three weeks without food.
Keeping this “rule of 3’s” in mind will help you know how you need to live in the wild. As you’ll quickly see, fire and water are your two most important and most immediate needs above all others.
Fire
Making fire is rather easy if you have a lighter; however, lighters will eventually run out of fuel. So, how can you ensure that you will always have fire? You should know several methods in order to preserve your ability to make the next fire.
We are going to show you one way of making sure that you always have fire, but please keep in mind that you should know several primitive methods and several surefire methods, just incase.
The surefire method is by using a ferro-rod, or a rod composed of ferrocerium. These can be bought in any camp store, and they are widely available and cheap.
A dry cotton ball will often light on one strike from the ferro-rod, and coating the cotton ball in petroleum jelly will slow the burn rate, which will keep it lit for around three minutes.
Your firewood setup is crucial to building your fire. What you need is a big handful of small twigs that are no larger than the size of a pencil lead. Then, secure twigs that are pencil-thick. After that, find sticks that are thumb-thick, and then you can work on larger wood for sustaining the fire. Also, you should acquire a piece of bark that is roughly the size of your fire. The reason for the bark is that the ground is almost always cold and wet, hurting your tinder’s ability to stay hot enough for combustion. The bark will keep it dry while you get the fire started.

Lay a thumb-thick stick across the bark, and then place the cotton ball on the platform. Strike sparks from your ferro-rod on the cotton until it lights. Then, add your pencil-lead-thick sticks on top of the cotton, laying them across the thumb-thick stick. Now, as we mentioned in the last series, your fire needs oxygen, fuel, and heat. So, if it looks like the burning cotton is being suffocated by the twigs, then lift up the thumb-thick stick, allowing it to breathe. It shouldn’t take long for even damp twigs to ignite (especially if you picked your sticks that were suspended off the ground). The time from ferro-rod strike to a sustainable fire should be no more than five minutes…..more here