Start a Fire When Everything Is Wet

The reason people fail at wet fire is that they try to light wet wood. Rain almost never penetrates more than a few millimeters into standing dead wood, and it does not reach the inside of a fallen log at all. Everything you need is dry. It is just wrapped in a wet skin you have to get through.

How to do it

1. Build a platform before you build a fire

   Wet ground pulls heat out of a young fire and steams it to death. Lay a raft of wrist-thick sticks or a slab of bark first, and build on top of that. Two minutes, enormous difference.

2. Harvest standing dead, never ground wood

   Anything lying on the ground has been soaking for days. Look for dead branches still attached to a trunk, snapped off at shoulder height. If it snaps clean with a crack it is dry. If it bends, walk away.

3. Get to the dry core

   Baton or shave the wet outer layer off with your knife until you reach pale dry wood. Take feather sticks off that core: long thin curls still attached at one end. Six good feather sticks beat a pile of shavings that blow away.

4. Find the tinder that stays dry in rain

   Standing dead conifer twigs from the underside of a low branch, birch bark, resin-soaked pine knots, the fluff inside a dead thistle head, dry grass from under an overhang. Under a big conifer there is almost always a dry apron of needles right against the trunk.

5. Light small and feed relentlessly

   Get a flame in the feather sticks, then add pencil-thin, then thumb-thick, then wrist-thick. Nothing bigger until you have a bed of coals. The most common failure is a good flame smothered by a piece of wood three sizes too large.

6. Dry your next round on the edge

   Stack the wood you plan to burn next around the outside of the fire. By the time you need it, the surface moisture is gone.

Where people go wrong

• Using wood off the ground. It is the wettest and rottenest material available and it will not catch.
• Building directly on wet soil. Heat goes down into the ground instead of into your fire.
• Feeding too big too soon. A young flame needs airflow more than fuel. Big wood cuts the air off.
• Leaving your lighter in your pack. Keep an ignition source in a pocket against your body. A cold wet lighter will not spark.