How to Make a Fire in Wet and Rainy Conditions - Finding Dry Kindling and Tinder

Today I'm going to show you how to get a fire started in the rain, when everything in the woods is soaking wet. It's very easy to make a fire on a nice beautiful day, but when everything is wet like this after a rain, it can be a lot more challenging. But if you know what to do, and what materials to look for, it doesn't have to be that difficult. So let's go find some tinder and kindling. You can see everything on the forest floor is soaking wet. These sticks are pretty soaked, at least on the outside. Now you can split these and get to the inside, more dry part of it. Now this will burn, but not very good. Once my fire gets going, gets nice and hot, then I can add wet kindling like this. There's a lot of big rocks on this mountain, so I'm going to use those to my advantage. You can see everything outside of the rocks on the ground is soaking wet, but when you look underneath of there, everything is bone dry. You can see the difference. All these fallen branches underneath of this rock, they're sheltered from the rain. So this will make great kindling. You can hear that snap. When it snaps nice and crisp like that, you know it's dry. Here's some bigger ones here. This will make good tinder. You just want to be careful reaching under these rocks, especially in the spring and summer when the snakes are active. So right under here is another good spot. I'll also show you what to do if you can't find any dry kindling or tinder. So I'll take this. It's sitting up off the ground. These branches are wet on the outside, but since they're sitting up off the ground, they're not soaking up all that groundwater and should be pretty dry on the inside. Dead standing trees are another thing you want to look for. Now normally I would say to use fatwood or some other kind of fire starter, but maybe you don't have any pines in your area to be able to find this stuff. So we're going to make a fire without using any kind of fire starter. So the best thing to do here would be to make the fire underneath of this rock where it's sheltered from the rain, but for the sake of the video, I'm going to make it over here outside of the rock because maybe you can't find something like this. Or you can hang a tarp up if you have one over top of your fire to keep the rain off of it that way, which is why it's always good to come prepared, but maybe you don't have one of those either. First I'll make a platform with these branches. All right, so I'm going to lay my base down first. This stuff is wet. I'll put my dry stuff on top of all of this, and as that burns, it'll dry out all the wet material on the bottom. All right, so I have a piece cut here. I'm going to split this, and you can see how much more dry that wood is on the inside than it is on the outside, and that's why we want to split them. And I'll split those again. I'll be using these split pieces as fuel for my fire after it gets going good and hot, but also to make feather sticks. Days like today is where that birch oil comes in handy. Rub it on your tools and they won't get rusty. So right down the center is where I'm going to make my fine shavings. By doing this, I'm making kindling and tinder from the inner part of the branch that'll light up real easy. This does take some practice. The finer the shavings, the better, and the more of these you make, the easier time you're going to have getting your fire going. There you go. So ideally you want to make about a dozen of these things at least, but it takes time and sometimes you don't have that much time. So here's all that dry material that I got under the rock. I'll put that on top of everything else. Put my feather sticks right next to it, and I'm going to stay hunched over it like this just to keep the rain off of it while I light it. It's going to take a lot of sparks to ignite these feather sticks. I'm using ferrocerium, but if you have a lighter, it'll light up a lot more easily. Lighters are just a little less reliable. Throw that dry material on top of that nice and loosely so I don't smother the fire. Then I can start adding my bigger split stuff once the flames get going nice and hot. Nice and warm now. If you have a tarp or something, you can hang it up about five or six feet above the fire. Once it gets really hot, the rain won't affect it too much. So like I said, the best thing to do would be to have started this fire underneath of that rock over there. Keep the rain off of it more, but I wanted to make it a little more challenging because maybe you don't have a perfect rock to build a fire under.