This series is for those involved in vehicle-supported adventures. The content can help anyone traveling solo survive a minor or major mishap, breakdown, or vehicle accident in the remote backcountry. The series is not, however, about “living off the land” for an endless length of time. The presented information can help you remain comfortable for several hours, a couple of days, or even a week or two in the backcountry should an off-roading adventure go bad.

In the first installment in this series, we discussed the Survival Pyramid and the Will to Live. Click here to read this article

Be sure and read Part I of Survival Fire Building before reading this article.

How to Start Your Survival Fire

There are several ways to start a fire with dry, fluffy tinder. Consider carrying at least two or three of these methods in your survival bag. When one doesn’t work, another might. In my opinion, the best two ways to start a survival fire is with a disposable fluid lighter and a ferrocerium striker.

Disposable Fluid Lighter: Every survival bag should have several disposable lighters. A stormproof-style survival butane lighter (shown below left), is best. This butane lighter, made by Ultimate Survival, is refillable and worth the investment price. This is my favorite way to light fires when overlanding.

Ferrocerium Striker: There are several commercially available “sparking” survival fire-starters made from ferrocerium. Ferrocerium is a manmade metallic material that, when scraped against a rough surface, gives off sparks reaching temperatures of 1,649°C/3,000°F – perfect for starting fires with tinder.

Magnesium Ferrocerium Rod Combo: These commonly purchased fire-starting items consist of a small bar of magnesium with a ferrocerium rod embedded in one side. Typically attached is a sharp implement used to scrape fragments of magnesium and strike the ferrocerium rod. To start a fire, first scrape off a small pile of magnesium shavings surrounded by loose kindling. Use the ferro steel sparks to ignite the fast burning, high temperature magnesium.

Storm, Waterproof, or Strike-Anywhere Matches: Matches are another “must have” in your survival bag. The better ones can resist wind and water, but all are best carried in a waterproof container.

Nine-Volt Battery and Steel Wool: Touching 0000-grade (super fine) steel wool to the terminals of a nine-volt battery starts the steel wool glowing. Surround the steel wool with some tinder to get your fire going. With a bit of practice, this fire-starting technique can get fires going in short order. When storing a battery and steel wool in your survival bag, make sure they are in separate containers.

Flare: You don’t want to waste a hand-held flare that you might need to use to signal Search and Rescue personnel, but in an emergency, a flare can start a fire very quickly. If you are hypothermic and need warmth right away, use a flare to quickly start a fire, even when using moist kindling.

The Numyth Vulcan Fire Piston: This product uses air compression to start a small piece of tinder glowing. When air is compressed quickly, it heats the surrounding air to the point where a small amount of tinder, like char cloth, begins to glow. The ember is capable of starting a fire when drier tinder is added along with oxygen by blowing on the smoldering mass. I have gotten a fire to start with this device, but not without lots of work.

Making Your Fire

The following pictorial illustrates one way to organize and get your fire going. The method shown here is often taught in survival courses.
Build a bird’s nest (aka “tinder bundle”) for fire starting. Begin by laying out some organized tinder in various size piles.

Construct your bird’s nest by starting with a wide, flat base of loose bark or punkwood on which to add your finer, dry tinder. If no wide, flexible base is available, simply crisscross and weave longer tinder fibers together to build a base shell. Once the shell is made, add fine, crushed, dry material in the middle of the nest.

Once your bird’s nest is finished, you’ll need a glowing ember to place in the middle of your nest – on top of your most loose and ground-up tinder. Assuming you don’t have a lighter or match, you may use a ferrocerium striker and the backside of a knife to spark some char cloth.

Take your time once you add an ember to your nest. Raise the nest up near your mouth. Blow gently onto the ember in the nest to add oxygen, then lower it, then raise it again and blow on it. Do this repetitively until you get lots of smoke, then finally a flame. Once you begin to get smoke, watch closely for a flame to burst from the nest.

When a flame does appear, be prepared to place the nest under a kindling teepee that has lots of space between the sticks to allow oxygen to reach the new flame. Once the flame gets going robustly, continue to add your left over tinder and kindling from your readied pile. Once you have a pretty good fire going with your kindling, you may finally add fuel to your fire to sustain it over time.

The next installment of Survival and Bushcraft for Overlanders  will begin to cover the large topic of water disinfection in the field. Don’t miss this if you are thirsty. No one wants to get Giardia, Cryptosporidium, or Blastocystosis.

Words & Photos by Bob Wohlers

Bob Wohlers teaches corporate, government, and recreational off-road safety, survival, and wilderness first aid courses. Some of Bob’s corporate clients have included T-Mobile, Verizon, PG&E, and Southern California Edison. As a registered government contractor, he teaches courses for the National Park Service and BLM. Currently, Bob teaches monthly introductory and advanced recreational off-roading at Prairie City, a California State Recreational Vehicular Area (SRVA). He also organizes and leads groups on 4WD adventure tours into the remote backcountry. Find out more about his trainings and guided adventures at discoveroffroading.com.

Bob’s new book, “Live Long to Wander-Basic Survival and Bushcraft for Vehicle-Supported Adventure: To be released at the 2017 Overland Expo in May.

This series is for those involved in vehicle-supported adventures. The content can help anyone survive a minor or major mishap, breakdown, or vehicle accident in the remote backcountry. The series is not, however, about living off the land for an endless length of time. The presented information can help you remain comfortable for several hours, a couple of days, or even a week or two in the backcountry should an off-roading adventure go bad.

The first installment in this series discussed the Survival Pyramid and the Will to Live. Click here to read this article.

Watch any of the popular survival reality TV shows (Alone, Survivorman, etc.) and you’ll realize that fire building is very important. Even in a hot climate, fire can disinfect water, cook a meal, keep dangerous animals at bay, improve your morale, light your camp, and signal Search and Rescue (SAR) personnel. In cold climates, a fire can help you ward off extremely dangerous and deadly hypothermia.

To build a fire you need three important fuel types: tinder, kindling, and fuel.

Tinder

Tinder is any dry, loose, and fluffy material that can catch fire with a simple spark, electrical discharge, match, or directed heat from the sun.

In the natural environment, look for dry branches. Once you find some small branches, use your knife to begin shaving away thin, small, curling shards of wood. Also, look for:
-Dry pine needles
-Punk wood (the light and fluffy wood fibers found in the middle of rotten logs)
-Dry cattails
-Bark – small pieces that can be ground up by hand
-Dry moss and ground covering

Some of the best tinder is brought from home. Place homemade and commercially available tinder in individual zip-lock bags and keep a selection in your survival bag. -Cotton balls impregnated with petroleum jelly (the very best home-prepared tinder)
-Char cloth
-Commercially available tinder

Commercially available fire starting material or compounds include hexamine tablets and fire-starter mini-logs, bricks, squares, or nuggets. WetFire was developed for military personnel and is a universal lighting material that is odorless, easy to carry, and unaffected by wind or water. In fact, WetFire can catch fire while floating on top of the water. The only down side is that it is expensive. I have several small packets of WetFire in various gear bags I always take with me when overlanding.

Kindling

Kindling is larger and thicker than natural tinder. Kindling is dry, easily combustible material such as small sticks, twigs, pinecones, cardboard, or other dry material used to enlarge and extend a fire beyond burning tinder.

Fuel

Moving up in size, logs and other fuels are carefully added to burning kindling to sustain and enlarge the fire.

Start with smaller logs. Smaller logs will eventually become embers that can sustain the fire over time and easily ignite larger logs. Natural items considered fuel include dry standing wood, medium to large dead branches and logs, dried animal dung, and dry grasses twisted into a tight bunch.

When collecting fuel, having a hand saw can be very valuable. I have a saw and hatchet mounted on my off-road trailer. When collecting fuel, collect more than you think you’ll need. To keep a fire burning through an entire night, you will need at least 10 armloads of logs (although you can never have enough).

Ideal Size and Best Location for a Survival Fire

Keep your survival fire small – just large enough to keep you warm, boil water, or cook food. There is no need to have a large fire for hours on end. The larger the fire, the more fuel you burn at a rapid rate. Large fires require lots of fuel. This causes you to expend unnecessary calories collecting or cutting wood.

Instead of maintaining a large fire, keep on hand a large pile of kindling branches and logs to quickly add to your fire when you hear rescuers approach. Thin, green branches (fresh from a live tree) added to a hot fire during the day will produce lots of whitish smoke and be visible for some distance.

Part II of Survival Fire Building in The Adventure Portal will cover how to start a survival fire and how to make and sustain your fire. Look for it soon.

Words & Photos by Bob Wohlers:

Bob teaches corporate, government, and recreational off-road safety, survival, and wilderness first aid courses. Some of Bob’s corporate clients have included T-Mobile, Verizon, PG&E, and Southern California Edison. As a registered government contractor, he teaches courses for the National Park Service and BLM. Currently, Bob teaches monthly introductory and advanced recreational off-roading at Prairie City, a California State Recreational Vehicular Area (SRVA). He also organizes and leads groups on 4WD adventure tours into the remote backcountry. Find out more about his trainings and guided adventures at discoveroffroading.com

Bob’s new book, “Live Long to Wander-Basic Survival and Bushcraft for Vehicle-Supported Adventure: To be released at the 2017 Overland Expo in May.

The following article is from Jim Allen’s “Four Wheeler’s Bible” 2nd edition. Printed with permission from Jim.  The info contained in this article is tried and true. Give it a read as a reminder or to sharpen your off-roading skills.

Momentum is defined as “the impetus of movement” and a “complex mixture of mass and velocity.” Inertia is another word that fits.  For our purposes, the definition of inertia, ” a body in motion tends to stay in motion”,  is the most useful definition.  The weight of your vehicle carries it along until friction, air resistance, and other factors slow it down.  That inertia/momentum is a useful tool for four-wheeling, but it must be used wisely.

It takes a certain amount of traction to put your vehicle in motion.  When circumstances don’t make that traction available, a little momentum can carry your through.  Sometimes that just means a steady speed over a problem area, and other times it means gaining a little speed on good ground before you encounter the obstacle.  Emphasis is on the “little”, at least at first.

Always try going easy the first time and increase the level of intensity gradually until you reach the no-go point and abort the attempt.

Momentum in mud, Sand, and Snow

All three of these ground conditions are similar in that they combine low surface strength and low shear strength.  Not only do you sink, but you have no traction.  Momentum can launch you completely across some soft areas or provide you with just enough help to claw your way across with the minimal traction available.  With enough speed you can actually hydroplane across a soft surface, but control is just about impossible.  Using momentum across soft ground requires that you evaluate the surroundings along with the obstacle.  Are you going to end up sideways or lose it completely and slam into a tree or rock?

Momentum on Hill climbs

There are many hills on which you could not start from a dead stop, but if you have a little motion, you can keep going.  That means a steady speed on a hill.  You may encounter spots of lesser traction, or a steeper slope, and momentum may be enough to carry you past it.  If not, you must be ready to respond instantly before you come to a stop.  Sometimes that means a little more throttle; other times it means backing off for torque control.  Momentum can also be used at the start of a low-traction climb to help you up.  The momentum is built up on flat ground.  On a short hill without enough traction to climb slowly, this may take you up without spinning a tire.  On a long hill, safe and sane levels of momentum may just carry you halfway and leave you perched with spinning tires and a failed-climb maneuver to perform.  The approach to a hill also may limit your momentum options with a sharp transition from horizontal to vertical.  In other cases, you may be able to build up quite a head of steam but, just as with soft ground, you can have control problems with too much speed.

Momentum for Rockcrawling

Momentum is as useful in rocks as anywhere else, but because rocks are unyielding by nature, contact usually results in the vehicle getting the short straw.  As often as not, momentum fo rocky terrain comes into play when weight transfer unloads one axle and overloads the other.  This can happen on a straight climb, usually a very steep one if a highly tractive rock face is involved, or on ledges.  On a straight climb on rock faces, such as slickrock, play the game much like you would elsewhere;  maintain a steady speed and react appropriately if needed.  On a boulder-strewn landscape, your speed potential will be severely limited, but keep the momentum imparted and speeds as low as 1/mile per hour can be useful.  Again, try to maintain whatever movement you can rather than starting and stopping.  Climbing in loose rocks may require momentum, just as with soft ground, but too much speed can result in bouncing, slamming, cut tires, or a loss of control.

The ledge scenario involves the use of a “bump”.  Usually the front axle is up, though unloaded by weight transfer, and it’s the rear axle that can’t make the climb.  The bump combines momentum with a judicious stab of throttle at just the right time. If the driver applies a stab of throttle just as the rear tires hit the ledge, the momentum has the effect of momentarily “gluing” the tires to the rock by increasing ground pressure.  This can make the rig hop up that ledge like a jack-rabbit.  As you can imagine, the forces acting on the tire, suspension, and drivetrain are great, so the amount of momentum used, the amount of throttle, and the duration of the throttle, and the duration of the throttle application must be carefully chosen.  On a typical ledge, a “roll” of just a couple of feet is enough momentum for the bump.

You can buy a copy of Jim Allen’s Four-Wheeler’s Bible on Amazon.com

Photos courtesy of Lisa VanRynsoever, TAP, and Bernard Leitner