Hello folks,
This weekend my friends and I set out for a gold hunt. We got in to our spot later in the afternoon so we just set up camp for the night and had a couple beer. The wood all around was quite wet, and it took us a while to get enough gathered and split. Even the inside of most of the hardest, lightest, wood we could find was damp. We had to resort to some clever methods for getting things fired up, and drying out our damp wood. :) First thing we used was some Vaseline from our first aid kit. I used an old shirt I had with me but cotton balls work wonders. I cut the shirt into strips and got them all greased up with the petroleum jelly (Vaseline). This was placed on top of some tinder , underneath some more tinder, with some bigger split pieces set up as well. This got our fire started, but it was not hot enough and was a challenge to keep it rolling. So we moved on to another trick. If you are camping near any pine, spruce, fir, or true cedar, you should look for a tree that has been damaged nearby. The resin from these trees is extremely flammable, and will produce an immense amount of heat. There were spruce trees right in our camp that were ooozing resin in huge globs all over the moss on the trees. Only take what you need, don't hurt the trees.
There is also a lot of information available on how the Native Americans used these resins for medicine.
http://spruceresin.com/spruce_resin_and_folk_medicine.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/first-nations-woman-claims-spruce-gum-cured-cancer-1.2988970
Cheers,!
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