The very first thing you are going to lose during camping, is your favorite tool, often your fire starter.

It falls out of your pocket, in the morning, in a place you never think to check.

Often you never find it again, but having some backup matches is not enough.

You pick the best soft sandy spot in the woods, but the reason why it is so soft and sandy…

Is because that is a rain run off, or in really bad weather, where the flash flood happends.

Thus striking surface or regular matches gets wet and worn, and the strike anywhere matches get moist, and hardly worked to begin with.

You will need a regular lighter, and a cheap zippo, an you want to have the lighter fluid on you as well.

I bring BBQ lighter fluid, on my second trip from the car, but liter fluid is much smaller and ligher.

Listen, wood in the woods is wet, sometimes it rains, before you get there, so you can only tear off dry branches from a dead tree that dries fast.

Normally, you want to gather up twice as much wood as you think you need, and then cover it up with a garbage bag so that most of it stays dry.

But sometimes all your logs need drying, and lighter fluid will help a lot, but fire-starter blocks work even better.

The hiker version is the size of a soap, and it is cardboard paper soaked in wax, it is like a big fat candle that can dry, ignite and help you start your fire.

You should only use it when everything is wet, not to make your fire-starting easier.

You can make your own fire starters, by gathering up a bunch of dryer lint, and soaking it in as much candle wax as you can find - be careful it is flamable.

Having a bunch of random stuff is the way you you want to go, but don’t keep it all in one place.

You may not feel your fire-starter fanny pack falling off, you will be forced to walk back in search of it.

The hiker that you passed an hour ago, my think that it is someone ahead of them, and you may never find it.

It is overkill the same way, that the advice to never sleep beneath a dead tree is overkill.

There is no way in heck that your first dead tree will crush you, but eventually, one of those puppies has got to come down.

They are called widow makers, after the jack asses, that thought it was overkill.

Think of it as survival etiquette, account for multiple points of failure, more than three.

Because it is more than three, that puts you in that desperate situation that you must avoid at all cost.

Which brings us to the goodies, these are your keepsakes.

This is what you nonchalantly whip out in front of other hikers, that just use lighter fluid and matches like the damn dirty city slickers that they are.

You want flint and steel, it is exactly what it is called a flint stone, and a piece of steel that looks like brass knuckles.

These are often hand made, and have a lot of character.

Interstingly, you place your thumb over the chunk of flint, it is an actual rock about the size of a pine cone.

You put the brass knuckle looking piece of steel on your other hand, and dangerously whack the rock until the darn thing sparkles, I kid you not.

You will need charcloth, basically an old cotton shirt, that was put into a tin, and then into a fire, it charred, but it didn’t actually burn.

The sparks from the flint stone are enough to start an edge, and you blow on it, and put it in soft dry grass, imagine something like a bird nest.

This is why I carry lighter fluid with me, it is one of the heaviest things in my pack, but I never run out of charcloth.

Throw in the modern version into your pack, it is called a Firesteel, or Ferro rod and Striker fero is short for Ferrocerium.

Ferrocerium is the litte thing that sparkels when you run a scratchy, pocket lighter wheel over it, here in a big pencil version.

It is just a mix of metals designed to to make sparks, there is a bunch of stuff in there including iron, magnesium, and even neodymium.

It often has a wooden handle, as if to underline that it will make sparks for life, this is what military would use.

But again, don’t rely on one thing, whatever you use, you may lose.

And it is nowhere as fun as whacking the brass knuckle thingy near your thumb, over a sparkly rock.

The way you light a fire with sparks, is by sparking on something that burns easily, sparks are so quick to go out that they hardly burn you, if at all.

So you need charcloth, or magnesium shavings, and then feather like grass kindling, almost a birds nest.

If you use a match, you only need sticks just about as big as a match.

Whether you start with feather like material, or match like sticks.

You get your fire to gently move upwards, by only ever adding ever so larger versions.

Sometimes you may need to blow air on it, to encourage the fire to light.

You won’t be able to start a fire by putting a pencil sized stick over your kindling, that is just too much for the kindling to light, it won’t burn for long enough.

From feather like kindling, you can only move to grass, and then matchstick like bits of branches, and then slightly bigger and bigger.

Unless an emergency, leave standing trees alone, even ripping off white birch bark is not cool or impressive.

If you want to get technical and impressive, find an fallen pine that fell a while back.

Right at the base you will find yellow/red fatwood, well saturated with resin, it will burn easy and hot in any condition.