Starting a Fire in a Difficult Place
While cooking bone broth in an oven, I have grease spills from the lip that boil over and burn. Rather than wiping it with a rag or throwing it out, I may wipe it with a cotton ball or small cotton rag used later to start a fire; I would not do this with feedlot animal tallows.
A rag, cotton ball, dry cattail, wasp nest, or any other fine vegetable matter material will light and hold a hot flame longer when it is saturated with oil; this also makes use of oil that you would otherwise discard.
Birch bark. Lay a few slivers under your tightly crunched and bundled dry spruce twigs in cold, wintery conditions. The bark will light and hold a flame until the spruce kindling takes.
The pitch stick. A simple pitch glue recipe on the internet (1 part hot pitch glue with a near equal amount of crushed carbon brick and some beeswax mixed) will make a waterproof fire starter.
Simply wrap the glue, warm, around a hardy length of clean cotton cord and tie a loop at one end to dangle. The pitch stick may shatter if it's cold or not malleable enough and hits something while dangling.
A man was selling a derivation of this item with a match buried along with the other end of the inner cord; the head of the match is just beneath the pitch tip, so the covering could be easily peeled off and the match struck to make a standalone fire starter; this is not waterproof.
The tip can be lit and held under a small pile of spruce twigs in place of using petrol in your lighter. A 3-inch stick can light as many as 15 fires or so. Even in a cloud of fog or if the spruce twigs are damp, this quick pitch stick will reach kindles' dry core and start your fire without burdening you too much with matches or eating your lighter petrol.
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Yet another way to start a fire, particularly in winter, is to "prime" a fire by putting a clump of pitch right on top of your regular kindling sticks. Put your lit match or lit pitch stick under the clump, which is sitting on a pile of relatively thick and hastily acquired kindle sticks, so the fire rises through the kindle sticks to the pitch clump. The clump will melt the pitch and ignite, drip, spread, and fuel the fire; this method has saved me when I'm unwilling to look for fine kindling, make fine kindling, or my hands are too cold to use the magnesium stick. Pitch will hold the flame so the worst kindling will eventually take.
Collect clumps of the pitch from trees when a good portion becomes available. If storing your stash in a pouch, throw some ash into the pouch to prevent the clumps of pitch from sticking to the pouch or your hands.
Yet another fire starter to consider is the pitch nest method. Simply take some fresh, still soft pitch or sap from an appropriate tree (pine, spruce, etc.) and mix, by hand, with wasp or hornet nest paper, though most dry tinder will do (I think), in a 50/50 ratio. Light the ball, which needn't be larger than the tip of your thumb, and place it under your Kindle. The ball will maintain a fire until the kindle is lit.
When the branches are wet from fresh rain, collect large amounts of fresh, dry, sticky-state pitch sap and make a regular fire nest of spruce twigs, which may be damp from rain. Put a large amount of the messy sap on a twig and put the stick at the bottom of the nest. Hit the sap with a flame from either saved dry birch bark, which you should make a habbit to collect for a rainy day, a match, or lighter. Take another peice of broken sap and put it over the damp spruce twigs, over the fire from the sap bellow, for good measure.
A pattern should be apparent. Sap is the best tool to start a fire, in the damp, in the cold, the best waterproof tool to fuel the heat until whatever you have will take. Collect big chunks and hold them handy until needed.
Most people know this, but ill reitterate it just in case, you can use a thick log to make kindle enough for a roaring heat to take the damp stuff, by carving off the wet outer shell; once this is gone, you can use the dry core as needed.
