survival

Build A Survival Fire With Condoms and Underwear

Joe_Cermele — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:58:22 -0400

When my wife notices the small, square foil wrapper on my desk, she regards me with a coolly level gaze.

“I can explain,” I tell her. And I do, but she remains skeptical. After all, it’s not the kind of wrapper she’s used to seeing when I’m conducting research for this column. She becomes even more skeptical when I tell her I need it to start a fire.

After discovering the mess I’ve made of the kitchen—steel wool strewn on the floor, several unwrapped condoms, spent shotgun shells dripping wax onto the countertop—she admits that just possibly I’m telling the truth. But she banishes me to the backyard anyway, where a picnic table offers a more appropriate base of operations.

Each year, Field & Stream readers send us a truckload of fire-starting tips, ranging from the practical to the absurd. My editor has asked me to test a handful of the most promising, or at least the most interesting. The goal is to find the best tools in two categories: ignition and tinder.

The Spark: Ten minutes into the morning’s work and already I’m stumped. Following the reader’s instructions on how to start a fire with steel wool and a D battery produces heat, but no sparks. I decide to test the method using AA batteries, which a hunter is more likely to have handy in his GPS or headlamp. Holding two batteries end to end—with the base of one touching the terminal of the other—I press the steel wool to the extreme ends, which produces a fizz of sparks and glowing wire. The tricky part, I find, is placing a tinder nest on the wire, which glows for only a few seconds, and blowing it to a flame. Because the sparks are an indication that you are shorting out your batteries, you have to get it right quick. With numb fingers and core body temperature falling on a zero-degree night, my bet is you’d die trying.

A letter from a metallurgist spurs the next test. A few years ago, this man wrote to express his disgust with the magazine for printing an article I had written about starting fire with a knife and a flint, asserting that for steel to be hard enough to spark it would be too brittle to make a knife. I refute his argument in three flicks of the wrist. It’s true that you need a knife with a hard, non-stainless blade. But knocking around my basement are several knives, including Swedish Mora blades and some tarnished folding knives, that spark when struck against quartzite or flint. The knack is the flicking motion that scrapes steel against stone to produce the sparks, and catching the sparks on a piece of char cloth. Then you must transfer the glowing char cloth to a tinder bundle and blow it to flame.

By now the sun is high, which means it’s time to test the condom. The method, which the reader calls Forbidden Fire, involves filling the condom with water and using it as a lens to focus sunlight onto a pile of tinder. Unfortunately, this R-rated version of the old magnifying-glass fire falls into the wouldn’t-it-be-pretty-to-think-so category. I finally turn the trick after an hour of trying, having figured out that you have to fill the condom to the breaking point so that it makes a large, transparent sphere in order to concentrate the light into a small enough point. But even then you need strong overhead sun, bone-dry tinder, steady fingers, and time—none of which are likely in a survival situation (for video of this trick, click here).

Winner: Sparking fire with a knife and stone is far and away my favorite, but it’s really just a trick. To spark a fire, you’re better off going commercial. A steel striker (like the Brunton Striker Fire Starter; brunton.com) is easier to use and will produce a thicker shower of sparks.

The Flame: The first tinder experiment finds me holding a match to lint deposited by a dryer load of hunting wash, including a fleece jacket and Thermax underwear. The reader who submitted this tip has called lint the “perfect tinder,” but mine provides only anemic flame before subsiding into hot goo. Lint from a load of blue jeans flames up much higher. The secret is the fabric: Cotton lint makes excellent tinder, whereas lint from synthetics, like fleece, merely melts.

Next, I try out a couple of recipes for making candles. Pouring wax into a spent shotgun shell is the sexiest, but the simplest and most effective is the bottle-top candle. Pour candle wax into a plastic soda bottle cap and insert three wicks. The result will sustain a long-lasting flame.

Cotton balls smeared with petroleum jelly are another popular suggestion—and a good one. They are lightweight, compactible, and easily ignited. The jelly is fuel to a minute’s worth of tall flame that resists being blown out by the wind.

One reader suggests shredding up a bunch of cedar bark and rolling it into a ball. It flames all right, but a ball of shredded birch bark will burn even when wet and makes a better tinder.

I save the most bizarre tip, burning underwear, for last. Ducking under the lilacs for privacy, I shuck my drawers, strike a match under the crotch and behold—flames shoot 4 feet into the air. Holy Fruit of the Loom! Seriously, this is a great idea. Most hunters who have succumbed to hypothermia were found with matches in their pockets. They died because they couldn’t get tinder to stay lit. Many might have survived if they’d thought of burning their cotton y‑fronts, which flame like a blowtorch to start even damp firewood. The lesson? If you want to be safe, don’t worry about getting chafed.

Winner: The briefs are the hands- (or pants-) down winner.

The day has produced a couple of useful tips. The cotton balls will undoubtedly be in my hunting pack this fall. Beyond the specifics, what I’ve learned is there are a lot of ways to make a survival fire. Some methods are better than others. But the more resourceful you are with the gear you have at hand, and the more you practice making fires, “forbidden” and otherwise, the more likely you are to be rewarded with that candle of light and warmth to see you through a bitter night.

Seven Ways to Start a Fire Without a Match (And 13 More Primitive Survival Skills That Could Save Your Life)

fieldandstream-editor — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 07:00:00 -0400

Seven Primitive Survival Shelters That Could Save Your Life

fieldandstream-editor — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:20:00 -0400

Seven Ways To Light a Fire Without a Match

fieldandstream-editor — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 20:00:00 -0400

Make a Survival Kit out of an Altoids Tin

fieldandstream-editor — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 05:00:00 -0400

Survival Skills, Camping Tips, and More Great Outdoor Advice from Field and Stream Magazine

fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 11:00:00 -0400

Jerome B. Robinson has been writing about all aspects of the outdoors for more than 40 years. He started at F&S in 1989 and remains a regular contributor, including his monthly tip column. Although he is a generalist, Robinson is best known for his writing on dog training and on hunting and fishing in the Far North.

Field & Stream's Guide to Basic Camping and Fishing Knots (Now With More New Knots!)

fieldandstream-editor — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 05:00:00 -0400

Down and Out: How to Evacuate an Injured Man

fieldandstream-editor — Tue, 30 May 2006 05:20:00 -0400

Field & Stream Interview: Les Stroud, Survivorman

fieldandstream-editor — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 05:20:00 -0400

It's clear that Les Stroud is no stranger to abuse. The concept of his hit show Survivorman on the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel makes sure he gets plenty of it. For each episode, Stroud is dropped off in a different climate (ranging from Canadian Arctic to Georgian swamp) and has to survive alone without supplies for seven days-and film himself the entire time. An Ontario filmmaker and angler who grew up fishing in Muskoka, Stroud now ice fishes for lake trout, pickerel, and bass with his family. We tracked him down between wilderness exiles for a few questions.

F&S: A lot of people love your show-you make learning survival skills cool. Why?
LS: The thing that maybe scares people off of learning survival skills is a fear of looking like the ultimate Boy Scout, who shows up with all the gadgets. But people shouldn't think learning survival is corny or overkill. Anything can happen. You just don't know when the boat's gonna konk out, and it's a 70-kilometer walk to the nearest cabin. My film-company business partner was fishing once, went into the bush to use the washroom, got turned around, and was lost for three days.

F&S: What's the one item you find yourself wishing you had the most often?
LS: An insulated sleeping pad and a good butane lighter (matches in high altitude).

F&S: Is there a scenario that you wouldn't take on?
LS: Anything politically unstable, tsetse-fly areas in Africa, and skydiving.

F&S: Has there been a point on any of the trips when you felt you were in real danger?
LS: In the Arctic I woke up at one point on a flat rock and thought, "I may have this loaded rifle beside me, but if I wake up and a polar bear is breathing down on my face I don't stand a chance." The rescue crew was a great distance away and would not have been able to get to me in time.

F&S: So what's your insurance like?
LS: Please don't remind me.

The Outtakes

When we spoke with Les Stroud between tapings of his hit show Survivorman, we couldn't fit all of his comments into our May 2006 issue. Here's the balance of that interview:

F&S: How does hunting fit into your show?
LS: When the show first came out there was a method to my madness as far as what I caught and what I ate. I started off by saying that if you had to survive, you could scrounge for grubs and snails. I wanted to point out that you start small because sometimes that's all you can get. During that period, I'd get emails from people who were into hunting, saying, Come on, why don't you kill something, what's wrong with you? And I'd have to say to them that it ain't easy to kill something with no knife, no bow, no rifle. It's not easy even if you're a skilled hunter to hunt with nothing but your bare hands--it's brutally hard. Now, I'm getting into bigger animals, so I got a squirrel in Utah, and I took a rabbit in the plane crash episode. (As an aside, the reason I showed snaring rabbits is because it's so simple. A lot of survival books give you these big elaborate traps, and the average person can't just pull something like that out of their hat.) Once I started getting these bigger animals, all the anti-hunters emailed saying, Why are you killing a rabbit? And I thought, I just can't win.

The bottom line is, I show what you could do if you had to survive. End of story. It's not about hunting, it's not about tree hugging, it's about survival. And if a spruce tree is between me and survival, I'm going to take the life of that spruce tree and use it to save mine. If catching a rabbit is between me and survival, I'm going to catch a rabbit. That said, I'm a huge, fanatical nature lover. So it's not a light thing for me to take the life of that rabbit when I'm quote-unquote just producing a TV show. But maybe somewhere, thhere might be someone in trouble that actually catches a squirrel because they watched my show, and actually makes it through another day and survives, so there is that instructional aspect to it.

F&S: You don't seem shy about showing yourself messing up on camera.
LS: Well, it's like this. The last thing I wanted to present myself as was survival guru guy who knows it all. That's why I show fumbling and bumbling and failing. It's real to fail. There's three ways I approach my filming. Number one is when I show something easy that I know really well, and it comes across like, Man, this guy knows what he's doing. Number two is when there's something harder that I know really well, but I don't show it fast and easy because it may have taken me three months to learn, and I don't want to mislead the audience into thinking it's easy. And number three is when there's something I'm going to attempt--like the battery wires and gasoline fire on the plane crash show--that I've never done before. At that point, I'm a regular guy just seeing if he can make this work. I like that because you see a skill tried for the first time, and that is the reality of wilderness survival.

F&S: Has there been an easiest episode? A hardest episode?
LS: The desert was the easiest. December in the Sonora Desert is actually fairly pleasant. Cold nights, but the days are around 70 degrees F. And there's lots to eat. The hardest was the arctic. I was caught in between seasons. I asked the Inuit hunter who we consulted for the episode when the hardest time is to survive in the area, and he said right now. It was too warm to make a proper igloo but it was too early for any food to have returned. But in truth my two very hardest experiences were the original pilot versions of Survivorman that I first did, called 'Stranded' on Discovery Canada. On the first one there was a freak heat wave and all the mosquitoes came back out with a vengeance. They brutalized me for days with no screening, repellant, or place to hide. I almost quit. For the second show it was minus-40 every night in 5 feet of snow. Need I say more?

F&S: What's the one biggest mistake you see people making in the wild?
LS: Lack of preparation. But once they're out there, trying to rush.

F&S: Do you have any fishing trips coming up?
LS: I was out ice fishing with my kids just the other week. We have a cottage in Ontario which is in an area with beautiful rocks, trees, lakes, water--just a wonderful wild place. So we're always up there ice fishing, going after whitefish and stuff. I'll be fishing again soon.

Catch Survivorman on the Science Channel Fridays at 10 p.m. EST/PT. For airtimes on the Discovery Channel, check your local listings.

Survival by Knife

fieldandstream-editor — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 04:05:00 -0500

Fell a tree
If you can double a sapling over using one hand (limber it up by bending it back and forth several times), you can slice the trunk in half using downward pressure with an angle cut. The sapling must be green and the pressure should be evenly maintained throughout the cut, although with larger trees it may be necessary to rock the blade. Support the sapling as the trunk weakens. It will be impossible to finish the cut if the wood splinters.

To bring down softwood trees (poplar, birch, some evergreens) up to 6 inches in diameter, pound the knife tip into the tree at a right angle to the trunk, then jerk it sideways or pound the spine with a baton (a hard stick used as a club) to work the blade back and forth and widen the cut. Repeat the process around the trunk.

Split wood
A knife runs a poor second to an axe as a chopping tool, but when pounded with a baton, a small blade is perfectly capable of making dry splits from wood blocks. Rapping the knife with a baton, split a thin shingle from the side of a dry wood block. Sharpen the edges of the shingle to make a wedge, insert the wedge into a crack in the wood (or make a crack in the wood with the blade), then pound the wedge with a baton to make wood splits for the fire. Using a series of wedges, you can split a log section lengthwise. You can also use a baton and blade to split the chest cavity of an elk or moose. Keep to one side of the sternum for an easier cut.

Create cord
Cord is a primary survival tool, essential for fashioning bowstrings, lashing gear, and strengthening braces for shelter. The hide of almost any animal can be rendered into strips using a circular cutting technique. Drive the knifepoint into a flat wood surface, then pull the hide into the blade in a circular pattern to make a long strip. A guide peg driven into the wood maintains an even cut.

Make a fire starter
If you can't find dry kindling for building a fire, you can use your knife to make some in the form of a fuzz stick. Rest the end of a stout stick on the ground, then shave downward to lift curls of dry wood. At the end of each stroke, pry outward with the blade to spread the feathers. The end result will burn readily.

The following features make a knife perfect for woodcraft as well as for field dressing deer:
Blade: Five finger widths in length.
Spine: Flat for pounding with a baton. No upper finger guard.
Handle: Rounded and smooth with a tang that extends through the handle for strength.
Butt: Made from shatterproof material so that you can pound the knife point-first.