Fire Starter

[earlmck]

Friend Butch has a back pasture which used to be solid with pine trees -- both ponderosa and lodgepole. The pine beetle works these hard and over the years has killed many of his trees. I went over yesterday to help cut a few of the dead ones out of his pasture -- three lodgepole pines made barely a quarter of a cord of firewood but the nice thing about lodgepoles is that although the volume per tree is low they don't take long to cut and you get a bunch of rounds which fit in the stove without need of splitting.

LPineRounds0043.jpg

Another nice thing about these bug-killed trees is the pine pitch the tree produces as it tries to eject the beetle -- my favorite fire starter. A little piece of pitch the size of a fingernail burns hot and long and will get a fire going without a lot of attention to laying down kindling wood. I may not have got a lot of wood but I got at least two years worth of fire-starting pitch. And with my wood stove I make lots of fire starts in a year, especially in the milder part of the fall and spring when you only want a fire for a little while in the morning.

PinePitch0045.jpg

[Bill in Oregon]

Making me homesick for Oregon, Earl. Nothing like the smell of a stack of fresh-cut lodgepole firewood -- and that pitch has a perfume all its own.

[3leggedturtle]

Earl, Pine Pitch, Fatwood and Birch Bark are my main ways if starting fire. Need to try the Siberian Log fire one of these days. I miss having a good old wood stove. Todd/3leg

[.45colt]

Boy Earl that pitch would be better than gold when You need a fire. Thanks for the pictures. .

[octagon]

As a young man I toured the USA via motorcycle a few times, and always carried a 35mm film canister full of fresh pitch. It would start good campfires with fairly wet wood. Also had half a dozen fatwood sticks as well, sure nice when a cold fellow wants a fire right now.

[BenT]

My fire starter is pine cones. I have 6 gunny sacks full in the barn to get me through the winter. I keep an old coal bucket full of them by the wood stove.

[piller]

I have some paper egg cartons with dryer lint and wax from a wax melt room air freshener. Those take up a little more room, but they work.