You must have read my mind, Brangdon! The concept of more than one type of tinder was almost gelled in my mind when you described it so well in your post.

As a recent BAS (new acronym - "Born Again Survivalist") the second thing I added to my EDC after a knife was a BSA Hotspark on my keychain.

In the old days, I could build a fire in the worst of conditions with one match. So to me, "tinder" was always #3, with numbers 1 and 2 being provided by the match. While I did experiment with the military type magnesium block / ferro rod firestarter, the magnesium does a good job of #2.

With the hotspark only, I'm finding natural (#2) tinder materials harder to come by. Dry cattail fuzz works, as does very fine dry grass and finely shredded cedar bark. My goal is to get good with wood shavings, since the others can't always be found in a given area.

Now, for #3 I've never had trouble finding natural materials no matter where I am. My two favorites are birch bark and dry pine needles.

- Tom Scarince