One night this weekend, we had a small backyard fire to let the neighborhood kids make Smores. We have a little firepit, and to make it more "interesting", we let some of the kids try to start the fire. Now, my son and a couple of his buddies that camp with us were not in on the deal, too easy. (But, I think after watching, they might have realized that they have learned a few things along the way that aren't common to all their friends. Chock one up for dad.)

We had everything from the boys that wanted to take gasoline from the lawn mower, to another one who just held a lighter up against an 8 inch log, expecting it to burst miraculously into flames. (I'm not kidding) Eventually, they realized that the yard was littered with small sticks from the Noreaster we had last week. Most of them were still damp from the torrential rains, but, they had the right idea anyway. After not a lot of luck on their own, I showed them how to split the wood via batoning. To their amazement, there is a lot of dry wood inside that wet outer layer! I had a cheap fixed blade that I was using to split the small deadfall, shown below:



After a while, the kids were just interested in making the fire bigger, melting those marshmallows, and squishing them between graham crackers with a piece of Hershey bar. I had a couple myself, dark chocolate of course, for the health benefits

It was a reminder that even in a backyard full of damp soggy deadfall, there was plenty of dry wood for starting a small fire, we just had to split it a little to find the dry stuff.