I have been emmerced in this story since first seeing an alarm raised on a SanFrancisco tech blog regarding the missing family, a few hours before it hit the news.
Most of my questions have been answered (many by this forum), but a few still remain. The one I wish to ask now regards building a fire. I keep picturing those burning tires, I keep thinking gasoline, and I keep thinking wood. Billions of pieces of wood. I realize that all the wood on the ground is wet and I suppose higher dead branches are wet as well, but if you put wet wood on a fire burning strong enough, would the water not boil off, allowing the wood to burn? Could you not use gas to feed and build a core fire hot enough to accept scavanged wood? Collect wood, melt snow, thank God mom's got milk, build a raging fire, and keep the fire going. I am an Indiana boy,having no knowledge of this country, but I have built a number of camp fires, often with some scavanging, but I never really had to fall back on wet wood. I would appreciate knowing the fallacy of my image.