Among my many passions is fire. Lots of people fancy themselves expert fire starters because they’ve successfully lit fires under ideal conditions, given a healthy enough supply of paper and matches. Lighting fires under poor conditions, which is the only condition where you really NEED a fire is a different story. The worse you need it, the harder it is to accomplish. I have seen people who couldn’t keep a fire going with a bottle of charcoal lighter and a blow torch. That’s not an exaggeration…that’s what they were actually using (unsuccessfully) to try and light a fire on a summer afternoon with no wind and low humidity. Entertaining as it was to watch, it’s a good reminder that NO ignition system is foolproof. The technician has to do their job well regardless of the source of ignition, and the only way to get good at it is to practice. If you don’t regularly light fires in poor conditions you’re unlikely to have success in even moderate conditions when you’re stressed. The information here is a primer to explain one good way of lighting a fire, but if you don’t practice your results will likely be subpar.
Among people who like to build kits, fire-making kits are a favorite. There are so many things that burn well and it’s fun to put them together. Everything from rubber cement to vaseline soaked cotton balls to dryer lint to traffic flares are touted as the end-all-be-all for lighting a fire. The problem with these kits is they are seldom available when you really need to get that fire lit. Folks might cary their kit with them on a day hike the first couple weeks or months after they make it, but after that it probably gets left behind for something you KNOW you’ll need, like an apple or chocolate bar or just the cool-back comfort of not wearing a pack.
I’ve given the subject of fire starting more thought than even I think it warrants, and I’ve settled on a system that I’ve used for years and which has NEVER let me down, no matter how crappy the conditions. It’s also the only system I’ve found that will fit in any pants or shorts pocket and not be a bother to cary around. It’s small enough and light enough that it’s always there, which is half the problem solved.
Before we get into my wunder-system, my first and foremost fire starter is a bic lighter. That’s what lights my stove, melts the ends of cut cords, fires up the evening stogie, and lights the vast majority of my campfires. It’s simple, convenient, cheap, light, small and works most of the time. But it doesn’t work well when conditions are really poor.
So what I really count on is a different matter entirely. Essentially it’s a K&M match case with waterproof storm matches and a knife. There’s also a very small ferrocerium rod in there, but I’ve never used it (I’ve used others, just not the one in my match case). The match case slips easily into any pocket and rides there unnoticed. The closure is simple and foolproof and doubles as a tether so you can secure the match case to your clothing. It’s very lightweight and doesn’t have any sharp edges. To say it’s over engineered is an understatement.

The K&M match case is a thing of beauty (http://www.kmmatchcase.com/). Absolutely waterproof, lightweight, and simple. (Aside from having purchased several of them, I have no affiliation with the makers.) They make standard and long sizes…the long ones fit the stormproof matches. The built in compass doesn’t do much for me, but I guess it doesn’t hurt, either. My compass apparently got subjected to a strong magnet and now points backwards. They even come with spare o-rings and cord, though I’ve never had to replace either. The double o-ring system is simply brilliant. I cary a match case in the mesh pocket of my kayaking vest where it’s soaked for days at a time and its never leaked. I even took it scuba diving once and at 65 feet under water, still no leaks. They just don’t leak.
Stormproof matches are readily available from REI (with their brand), though many places cary them under different brands and they’re all the same match, near as I can tell. They’re pretty amazing. They burn hot for about 12 seconds and once lit, they don’t go out, even if you stick them under water. That 12 seconds of hot flame is enough heat to ignite even course, damp tinder if it’s laid right. The downside to the stormproof matches is they require a striking strip…they’re not “strike anywhere”. When putting the striking strips in the match case, be SURE to have the striking surface away from the matches. They don’t require oxygen to burn and while I don’t know for sure what would happen if a dozen storm matches went off in your pocket, I bet it would leave a mark. Also, the matches need to be replaced every six months or so. They do not last indefinitely inside the match case, though you can replace them with matches from the original package so long as it was stored in a cool, dry place. Strike a couple up just to make sure they’re still fresh.
Storm match next to a regular kitchen match.

A very small ferrocerium rod takes the place of one match. What it gives me is another way to ignite the matches if the striking tips get compromised, as well as a long-term way of lighting fires if I use the matches up. Ferrocerium rods are not new, but they’re all the rage among a certain group of folks. Because everyone who ever made a ooh-tube video involving fire uses one for ignition, there’s an idea that they’re particularly good. They’re not. While they have advantages, they have no ability to dry out and pre-heat tinder, so unless your tinder is so fine and dry that it will light instantly, the ferrocerium rod isn’t going to get a fire going for you. Now they are great fun and I highly recommend people use one for their daily fire lighting chores, as it will teach them what fine tinder really is and force them to take more time in their fire building. Other than that, I don’t have much use for them.
Also, ferrocerium rods will chemically react with the matches and turn to powder if not protected. I keep mine wrapped in a piece of aluminum foil, but a coating of fingernail polish works too.
So the match case means I always have a good source of stormproof matches, which is a start. Next step is to prepare tinder and kindling which will readily ignite from that ignition. The technique that has worked for me every single time is to use a knife to make a large pile of shavings and light it with the stormproof match. It’s not always the best technique, as many environments have a plethora of natural tinders which are easy to collect and burn ferociously. But if you don’t know how to identify and gather that tinder, or it’s too dark to find it, or your leg is caught in a bear trap, wood shavings and a match will get you a fire wherever there is a piece of wood to burn.
I’m operating under the theory that everyone caries a knife all the time. I’ll frequently forget my wallet, my keys, my phone, and sometimes even shoes, but I doubt I’ve forgotten to slip a knife into my pocket twice in forty years. I ALWAYS have a knife, or two, or three with me. Not because a knife saved my life back in ‘Nam (wasn’t there), or because I think a knife will allow me to thrive after the apocalypse (it won’t), or because I’m dangerous like that (I’m not). I always have a knife with me because I love knives… have since I was a toddler. Some folks think that carrying a knife is a thing from yesteryear, but modern plastic packaging has made a knife more valuable than it’s ever been. At this point I don’t think I could even liberate a peanut or a potato chip without one, much less get into a blister pack. And being a dedicated knife carrier keeps you from flying commercial, which is a bonus in SO many ways…
Most people figure a knife is a knife is a knife, but different knives preform dramatically divergently in regards to cutting wood. While any sharp knife will make shavings, some will do it with a fraction of the effort of others.
All of these sheath knives work well at carving wood. In my experience the two far right knives are too heavy to cary regularly. The black handled knife is made of thinner stock and is the limit of what I’ll tote around. The three knives on the left get the majority of the work done. An axe is superior to a knife for almost every bush living and fire lighting chore, but they’re too difficult to cary around when you don’t expect to need one.

You need a sharp knife. It should shave the hair off the back of your knuckles. If your knife isn’t sharp! Sharp!! SHARP!!! then no other attribute it possesses will compensate for that fatal flaw. Either figure out how to keep it razor sharp or discard it for a knife that you can. There are so many knives out there that it’s futile to say “use this one”, but I will say that many of the popular one-hand-opening knives that dominate the market today are actually terrible at cutting wood. They may be quality tools and they may even be sharp, but they often lack the geometry needed to efficiently cut wood. Serrated blades are as horrible at wood carving as they are fantastic at cutting rope. The stockman knife your grandfather probably carried will work well, if you still have it. A swiss army knife is light for the task but will work if you’re careful not to over-strain it. I prefer a small fixed-blade knife with a scandi grind (a puukko) above all else, but folding knives are handier to carry. I also tend to distain the “wonder steels” such as D2, CPM S30V, and many stainless varieties which “take a terrible edge an hold it forever”, favoring good high-carbon steels like O1 and A2 which are easy to bring to a shaving edge and hold it wonderfully unless you’re hacking oil barrels open or chipping through cinder block walls.
A knife has been called the single most important tool for wilderness living or survival, but aside from butchering game, other tools are almost always superior to a knife for a given chore. The reason a knife is seen as so important is because even though it’s not the best tool for the job it’ll do in an pinch, and it’s light and small enough to always be with you. That’s a good thing to keep in mind when selecting a knife. Large knives are fun, but inconvenient to cary, and not nearly as useful as a small axe. If it’s not compact and light enough to always be with you without you noticing, it’ll eventually get left behind. For a sheath knife my test is whether I can leave the knife attached to my pants or shorts when I change in and out of them. If the knife is bulky or heavy enough that I have to remove it at night and put it back on in the morning, it’s too big. A folding knife that needs a belt sheath makes no sense to me at all. If I’m going to wear it on my belt I want the usability of a fixed blade.
These are all quality folding knives and super sharp, but they don’t preform the same on wood. The serrated knife on the far right is a great river knife where cutting rope is the primary concern, but a poor choice for the woods. The three knives on the left will make a pile of shavings with half the effort of the other five knives. The Enzo knife third from the left works better than any of the rest.

The Enzo Bork with a scandi grind is by far the most capable folding knife I’ve ever used for working wood. The blade is superb, and while it’s heavier than may other folders, the full sized handle makes it comfortable to use for extended periods of time.

My two most used knives out of the dozens I own. They get used the most because they work the best…easy to cary, comfortable to use, great geometry for cutting wood, and razor sharp.
How do you know if your knife is good at cutting wood? Try it. Like everything else, making a pile of shavings is a skill that looks simple until you do it for yourself. If you don’t whittle for a hobby, spend some time making shaving piles before you need them and you’ll learn more than you’d suspect. The goal here is to make as big a pile of shavings as you can in a reasonable amount of time. Feather sticks are neat and do make them if you can, but a pile of shavings works almost as well. Use the driest wood you can find, but almost any knot-free, straight-grained wood will work if you cut it fine enough. From a kneeling position put one end of the stick on the ground, and with a semi-ridged arm use your torso to move the knife up and down while making the shavings. Avoid knots and use the straightest grain available on your sticks for the shaving pile. Curls are desirable. The curved portion of the blade makes the best curls. If necessary a fixed blade knife can be used to split wood by taping the back of the blade with a stick to drive it lengthwise through the piece to be split, thus exposing the dryer wood inside. Done cautiously this will not damage the knife. Don’t try that with a folder…you’ll damage it.
Leaving the shavings attached to the stick keeps them together and is called a feather stick. They work great but require significantly more skill than just making shavings.

A quick word of caution: They say a dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one, and that’s true up to a point. Because they require more force to use, dull knives are more likely to slip and end up somewhere they don’t belong…like in your thigh. But it’s worth mentioning that a razor sharp knife will cause severe injuries with any misstep, including minor ones that would be little more than annoyances with a dull knife. There are right and wrong techniques for using a knife, and deep in the bush is not the ideal place to learn or practice them. If you’re not a cutter but want to start, learn the basic skills at home.
I’ve tested this system pretty well, both in the field and in the worst conditions I could simulate at home.
After a solid week of rain, 2.5 inches in the last 14 hours alone, I set out to light a fire.
Temp: 51 degrees
Dew point: 52 degrees
Humidity: 97%
Raining steady, occasionally hard.
Wind 12 gusting to 24 mph.
I picked a dead pine that was down, but not all the way on the ground. You could break it, but you had to bend it past 180 degrees to do so.
I used my knife to shave as much as I could off the top of the tree, staying with a piece that went from about half wrist-thick to thumb thickness at the end.
Eight minutes of shavings with a razor sharp knife:

I put what I thought were the best shavings from deeper in the wood at the bottom and stacked the wetter shavings on top of it. All of the shaving were coarse and wet, both from the condition of the tree and from the rain. The match was also wet from the time it took to photograph it to light it.
One storm match inserted at the bottom of the pile and it lit off. Total time from tree to ignition: nine minutes (not including the picture taking). Note that I left the knots alone and cut around them… carve the easiest wood first and leave the tough bits for when the fire is going well.
Twenty seconds after applying the one and only match:

From this point I kept shaving down pieces of the tree and feeding the shavings onto the fire. As the fire got larger and the pieces got smaller, I added them and grabbed the next piece. It didn't take long for the fire to shatter the piece of tile I built it on (I was in my front yard, after all).

Next I picked a soggy, slimy, partly rotten piece of black oak off the ground. Oak is not good tinder by any means, as unlike pine or fir it has no volatile sap and absorbs water more completely, and this piece was really wet with moss and lichens growing on it.

Temp: 52
Dew Point: 53
Humidity: 98%
Raining lightly.
Same drill as before...one oak branch about wrist thickness, one puukko knife, and eight minutes worth of shavings. Note I didn’t try to whittle the branch from one end to the other: I picked the easiest sections to shave and left the difficult sections for later.

Make a central pocket with the best curls available at the bottom of the pile. Know exactly where you’re going to put the match before you light it.

While I mentioned the time it took me to make the shaving piles, where most people fail in lighting a fire is rushing the job. It can easily take twenty or thirty minutes to collect and prepare enough wood for a fire to sustain itself while you collect more wood. If you need ten minutes worth of shavings to ignite your kindling and you try to light the fire with only five minutes of shavings, you’re now fifteen minutes away from a possible fire. Take your time and get it right the FIRST try. Have more tinder than you need, not just what you think is enough.
Just like before, I keep shaving down big pieces and adding the shavings till the big pieces are small enough to burn. A couple of these pieces are too large to burn but the fire is hot enough to start drying them out while I put more shavings on. At this point the fire is able to withstand heavier rain or wind and has enough heat to quickly ignite finger-thick wood, even if damp.
Obviously I’m only showing the ignition and establishment phases of fire building here, but a person of normal ability who’s prepared well should be able to sustain and build the fire from here on out. Arranging heavier fuel around and above the tinder pile before lighting is fine if you’re confident about ignition, but it limits your ability to continue adding shavings and fine kindling during the fragile establishment phase.

Like everything else, there’s more than one right way to light a fire. But this is the only system I’ve found that is small and light enough that it’s always with me in the woods and which will always get a fire lit. And at this point a shaving pile is about the only way I light a fire, regardless of what else might be available. It keeps me in practice and is quick, simple and reliable, and it lets me play with my knives.
Some really good advice in there.
