A Great Fall Day

This used to be a blue beech tree, right next to it's the same blue beech or mussel wood. But as you can see, just like with birch, the wood itself rots faster than the bark. So actually, like this is the old wood, it's down to a quarter of the size it was, and it's left all this extra bark left over. So the blue beech bark will work similar to birch bark in the fact that it has oils in it and it will take a strike from a fire steel. so to be able to find even one piece this big is is a great find in the hardwoods but i got this whole big tree full of it all right i've decided to post up underneath this big tree it's either a maple or an oak probably an oak but uh oh i could check out the leaves on the ground and see yeah i believe it's a red oak but anyways here it's like uh the ground is up higher probably because the roots of the tree but i'm gonna hang out here for a while and maybe make the fire and whatnot here's my gear for the day got it in my expedition condor got my tripod for my camera there on the right and uh trailhawk water bottle on the left it's a good little pack so uh obviously first off i'm about to make a fire like all you guys know you got to clear the spots off uh take out the debris and leaves and whatnot the ground's really wet right now so what i want is a platform And I know you guys already know this I'm just telling you anyway I like to use ash bark if I can find it big thick ash bark If not I'll use like a layer of sticks that I just break and pound the ground So another couple pieces of kit that I carry is one of these blue foam pads To kneel on to sit on especially right now the ground's soaking wet so it really comes in handy So I have that and also a bandana to catch my shavings in The other side of the log there where I'm working that's kind of what I'm looking for there lots of curls lots of air in between some of these bigger ones aren't so great but you get the gist so I stored that blue beech bark in my pocket got a little banged up but that's all right it'll still work I actually need to shred some up first to make it a little bit smaller so that the fire still will accept it easier lovely sirens in the background for good audio so there it goes I don't know if you can hear it or see it but it's sizzling and it's got black smoke coming off of it so like i said in the hardwoods environment that's about this and oak barks uh pin oak bark is about the best you're going to come to uh having something like birch bark and it's definitely not even necessary it's just fun to play around with once in a while so that's still just the bark burning that's an established fire from just bark it's pretty cool i think so at least so you don't hear about that as much even you don't hear anything about blue beech one thing i do know about blue beech is you're not supposed to cook with the wood like burning the wood and for cooking fire I guess it's got some kind of toxins in it you want to cook on this and that's just the bark that'll be long burned up by the time I cook on it so I don't know for anybody who doesn't know what I'm doing I'm just marking it with my knife and batoning it out it's a soft wood I don't go all the way through it I'm carving everything out except for the top almost gives me a good little bit of rest on the support stick so I got this great back maybe about a month ago I'm using it about five six times now it's one of the most useful pieces of kit I have and the best part of what it was called my buddies made it for me so uh thanks a lot guys what I'm doing is cooking my bacon I've seen people hang it over the fire on a stick and stuff and I think that's really cool but I tried to do it one time and it did not work out for me at all I think it takes a it's a little bit of patience and I don't have that too much when it comes to food