One of my many New Years Resolutions is to do a little more camping this year. Not hooking up an RV to the car and going somewhere, but actual backcountry hiking and camping. Carry in, carry out.
I grew up in a house with an avid outdoorsman for a father, and spent more than my fair share of summer weekends either camping in the backcountry or on camping trips to tent-only sites. One of my favorite excursions as a kid was to go out to Tully Lake in MA, where we'd load up everything in our canoe and boat across the lake and over to the campsite. But as with most things, once post-college adult life sank in, spending a weekend camping just wasn't made a priority. Moose was a Boy Scout when he was younger, so I know somewhere in that head of his, he must have some outdoors skills aside from hunting. When you compare the two of us, I think I might edge him out a bit more in the camping experience department, but this is where our skills can meet in the middle. Most important: he's on board with my crazy idea for us to be a little more outdoorsy. I worry that if I overload him with too much at one time, it will spell the end of this little experiment.
When I was on Amazon the other day shopping with my "spend it on crap I need" allocation from the tax return, I decided to take advantage of our Prime membership and have a ton of stuff sent to us. Sure, it was stuff like running shoes, gardening supplies, wedding decorations, and other random things, but I also threw in one of these: a Light My Fire ferro stick.
I have never used a ferro stick before. Nor have I ever rubbed two sticks together or used a magnesium stick. But after watching a few too many episodes of random survival TV shows, it seemed like a good idea.
I don't have any photos of this experience since I kept my phone far away from the fireplace, but it was pretty amusing. I'm sure any neighbor who was looking in our window might have thought we were welding something in our sitting room given the sparks this thing made.
So we huddled around the fireplace, with some dried sticks and small logs set up inside the fireplace, and tried to light our 'tinder' of crumpled newspaper.
Fresh out of the package, the first thing you need to do is remove the paint. Check.
Then strike it and make sparks fly onto your tinder. Check.
Fire. No check.
Strike again. Check.
FIRE! CHECK! QUICK GET THAT SHIT IN THE FIREPLACE!
I was able to set fire to our tinder three times, and Moose was able to do it once. Some of the things we did to make it "easier" was to use a non-essential knife (one of the 'cheap' $30 knives we have for random uses around the house) instead of the scraper that came with the stick, and bunched up our tinder a little better so that it was directly under the ferro stick and there was more surface area for the sparks to hit. The serrations on the knife's blade made TONS of sparks, but carved into the stick in ways that weren't necessary. But if you're in a bind and can't start a fire to save your life-- it's a sure-fire (get it?) way to go.
My method of putting more 'wrist' into the stroke seemed to be a little more productive than Moose's full arm stroke. That just sounds bad. But the wrist flick definitely produced more sparks.
Also good to note: we thought it would be a fun idea to test some paper soaked with Carmex since some outdoorsy-survival type blogs often reference Carmex as a good fire-starter. It is. I'm assuming other types of anti-chap agents might be as well.
How we could have tested things better:
Reading reviews before setting out to do it on our own. Multiple users recommended not using paper as your tinder. Oops. In 'real life' we likely wouldn't be hauling some paper into the wild with us.... unless it happened to be toilet paper, which apparently does start a decent fire. So now, the fact that we were able to start a fire with newspaper on multiple occasions is a little more impressive-- even if it did seem to take longer than it should have.
We have not yet purchased a camp stove, but apparently this method will also work to light your stove. Once we own one and I can give that a shot, I'll let you know.
Overall, I think this is a neat little gadget that will come in handy. I don't anticipate needing to use it all that often, but it's nice to know that we have it in the event of wet matches or no lighter fluid.
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