Survival is all about being prepared for any scenario that comes your way. You should have protections against wildlife; you should have the necessary equipment for building a shelter; you should have extensive knowledge in hunting, trapping, and fishing and many more important elements to stay alive.
I have spent a lot of time in the woods of Southeast Alaska.
If you don’t know, Southeast Alaska is part of the Tongass National Forest, which is actually a temperate rain forest.
If you wanted to start a campfire there you couldn’t just wait for a sunny day. That might be a month away!
So I picked up a few tricks on getting a fire going even when everything around me was wet from the constant rain.
Wet wood is a problem when starting a fire, but like all problems, there are solutions.
One solution is to use a solar cooker.
Or, you can face that wet wood and burn it anyway! Let’s look at how.
The Problem
Nearly everyone knows that water is bad for fire, but not everyone knows why. We’ll touch on that here.
There are three factors required to have fire: heat, oxygen, and fuel.
Wood is the fuel. Air supplies the oxygen. You provide the heat. We’ve covered how before, both with modern tools and using primitive skills.
Water, however, robs us of that heat. It takes over twice as much energy to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius as it does to raise the temperature of a gram of wood.
Then the water in the wood evaporates because its evaporation point is much lower than the wood’s kindling point. Evaporation cools the wood slightly, setting you back even further.
So you can burn wet wood, but you have to put a LOT of energy into drying the wood before it ignites!
There are other things you can do as well, so you don’t have to fight the water in the wood. We’ll start at the bottom.
Keep the Foundation Dry
If your supply of wood is wet, the ground is very likely to be wet as well.
Trying to start a fire on wet ground is an exercise in futility. One of the easiest things you can do to start a fire when everything is wet is to work towards making a dry fire base.
Clear out any snow, wet leaves, and mud. You might be able to find dryer soil underneath the top layer, so dig a little bit.
If you can find dry pieces of wood–we’ll explain how in a little bit–then lay several logs out and build your fire on top of that. By the time the fire burns down onto the ground, it should have dried out its immediate path.
Low-hanging branches and chunks of bark spread over the ground can also keep your fire from touching the moist earth.
You can also use something flat and dry as a base. Build your fire on a piece of cardboard or even some dry cloth.
If the initial surface is wet then your fire won’t take hold. Don’t be afraid, in a survival situation, to sacrifice dry resources so you can produce the fire necessary to keep you warm and dry.
Torn pieces of clothing can be used for the dry base and can also be used as dry tinder if you can’t find enough dry wood.
Speaking of tinder, unless you’re burning magnesium, you need to keep the tinder dry as well.
If the weather is still spitting rain at you then it can be worthwhile to create a teepee of kindling above the tinder to help deflect raindrops.
Other cover above that will also help keep water away, but be smart about it. Do not start a fire under low hanging branches or close to a flammable tarp. We don’t want to set the trees or equipment on fire.
