So it was a cold, blustery evening in beautiful Pasadena and I decided to try out my Strikeforce sparker in a controlled environment. First I made sure my lovely assistant was available for morale support and mountain lion abatement duty.





Next, I grabbed my hatchet and chipped off some nice thick bark and wood chips from an old stump in the backyard.







I wish I knew what type of tree this was but I don't, hopefully some armchair botanist on the forum can help me out. I used half a pellet of the wax impregnated cotton tinder that came with one of the various fire making systems I have as the base.



(shown atop the Strikeforce for scale.)


I then experimented with different configurations of using the wood chips and bark as both kindling and fuel. The Strikeforce reliably provided the abundant sparks and the tinder fired right up.








The wood chips worked great! They easily caught fire and were blazing away long before the tinder pellet was consumed, the bark on the other hand didn't do so well. If I had a good, strong fire going with the chips, I could add the bark to the flames and it would slowly fire up but only stay lit as long as the chips burned.


I don't get it, the bark was thick, bone dry and looked like it would be the perfect fuel but in reality, bark (or at least this variety), would have failed me in a survival situation.


Your thoughts...

I'm not much into tree names, but in my experience most barks don't burn well. I have come to the conclusion that they are there to try to protect the tree from fire (or something)...

I know for a fact that some trees have fire retardant in the bark. Especially pine trees since many of them rely on fires to open the cones to release the seeds. Some types of wood only burn if you split the rounds to get at the wood under the bark, its part of the reasons I prefer an axe over a saw as a survival tool.

Tamarisk just came to me. You can throw a log of that stuff, bark on, into a fire and it will barely smolder. Break the bark off first and it burns well...

Isn't that the species that drinks up several millions of gallons of Colorado River water every year?

Some bark is particularly good for getting a fire going... try birch bark, it burns like a torch. As others have pointed out, some barks don't seem to do as well, but, the barks that come off as strips, like birch laterally in strips, or cedar lengthwise, both burn well.

Don't know, I haven't ckecked their dipstick lately, but they are a desery climate tree, so they are probably always looking for water...

You sure are right about birch. I had my first experience with it last summer in Alaska, and was amazed. Right off of the tree is burns so well it actually sparks a little bit, kind of like those trick birthday candles...

Juniper bark makes great tinder! It is often used to make a tinder ball to turn the ember, from fire-by-friction, to a flame. I have done this myself with Yucca, Cottonwood, and a pine spindle and cedar fire-board. <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Well, this is somewhat related....but the best bark-like material I ever saw/tested for firestarting was some newspaper that my wife had hit with flat black paint when she was spraypainting something in the backyard. (Newspaper used to be bark, or something closely related, right?) Anyway, when I saw a scrap of the paper laying around in the yard, I grabbed my hand magnifying lens and hit it with a spot of sunlight. Within about 10 seconds it was flaming away madly. I could hardly blow it out. The paint was dry, and promoted the burning process considerably over just newspaper alone. Not only that, but the flat black surface really made it easy for the paper to get hot enough to burst into flame quickly, not just smoulder or spot-burn without flame like usually happens when you use a handlens on regular newsprint.