Some rice cooking on our hearth. I think rice is easiest to cook in this manner, once you get the hang of it. Some high burning kindling starts the boiling and then you leave it alone with some medium burning charcoal. The end result is perfect rice.
This morning I spent close to 45 minutes trying to start a fire in the rain as I have done many mornings lately. Perhaps you think that is extreme, but please remember charcoal briquets, lighter fluid, and good weather or else you’ll go inside and just cook it on your stove did not play into this equation.
So what does it take to start a natural fire in the rain? Let’s break it down:
1. Obviously you need a flame starter. This would most commonly be a lighter or matches. Lighters are better as matches are useless when wet and with high humidity they will get soggy and crumble after a few months even when great care is taken to keep them in a dry area. Sometimes I see a YouTube survivalist blog about starting fires with other things. Most of their suggestions are not very useful to me. Several lighters and matches will be on my survival bag must have list, whereas pieces of flint, a nine volt battery and gum wrappers probably won’t be. Needless to say the old magnifying glass in the sun trick is not likely to work in the rain either. And why would I have a magnifying glass but not a lighter? Fire burn time: A few seconds
2. You need something which keeps a SUSTAINED flame on your kindling. A lighter won’t cut it in the rain you will burn your thumb and waste all of your fluid long before you get those twigs to catch fire. Good choices include candles, which are also a high must have survivalist bag item, and black rubber strips cut from motorbike tires which can be found in many rural areas in Thailand. Other items which can serve this purpose include unused women’s sanitary pads and tampons, light plastic packaging such as on some dried ramon noodles (I’ve heard the noodles themselves burn very well but I’ve always been too hungry to waste food like that), dry synthetic sponges, dry paper and cardboard, dry toilet paper, et cetera. Some of these items are useless if wet unless you want to put out flames. If it’s been kept in plastic wrap to keep it dry they will usually work. Fire burn time: 1-2 minutes.
This is recently cut rubber from a tree. This one has too much water content to burn, but processed rubber will burn…and even these pieces if dried out will light also.
3. You need kindling, which is basically gathered small twigs and dried out leaves. Dried out palm leaves are good here, and split bamboo is one of my favorites to use, as it doesn’t soak in much rain even if left out in the monsoon for days. A branch of brown leaves blown off of a tree are great here even if found in the rain and brown palm fronds don’t take too much work to light either. Fire burn time: 1-5 minutes.
I like yellow for fires
4. You need medium length burners, which are things which usually take a little longer to set on fire thus requiring a larger flame to set on fire, but which burn with red hot embers for a fair amount of time afterwards. Good choices here include larger wood pieces, especially those split in the middle if found in the rain, coconut husks from brown hulled coconuts especially if kept fairly dry, charcoal, which is basically any black unburnt pieces from previous fires, larger yellow or brown bamboo, as the hollow air pocket inside makes it a good choice all around, and the middles of palm fronds. Fire burn time: 1-5 hours.
5. It’s really useful to have long length burners, which are usually much larger, like the trunks and large branches of dead trees. Cut tree trunks can sometimes be burned in a pit of types. These take a long time to catch on fire but can take almost as much work to put out. We had a dead tree here with an over one meter perhaps four foot circumference which was cut into logs in 2020. Most were taken, but some were left here during an extraordinarily rainy November of 2020. Three days later while in a few inches of standing water out in pouring near nonstop monsoon rain that sucker was still bright embers. Fire burn time: Overnight? 5 Days? How big is this piece of wood we’re dealing with here?
So you have all of the ingredients. How do you set up your potential fire? It will need oxygen so nothing should be too crowded together, but it also needs flame which means nothing should be too far apart. I deal with this balance every morning. I generally go with a teepee arrangement, but there are many others. The first thing I do is blow or sweep all of the white ashes out of the hearth, as they will choke the flames. Black unburnt pieces as mentioned before are useful as charcoal and can stay there.
Brother Tee is all about accelerators for the fire. I’m not impressed. He throws some gasoline on it and BOOM! This fireblast comes out of nowhere. Beyond the fireblast being potentially very dangerous, because it is, I don’t generally see good results from it. After 30 or 45 seconds in the rainy season that big fireblast has turned into a few sad leaves with tiny burning embers. It does not usually start fires which last for more than a few minutes. That isn’t even enough time to warm the pot for my coffee.
You are probably going to want to rain cover your hearth, perhaps with a tarp strung out over trees, though if it is truly heavy rain I’d try to pitch that roof with a pole or branch to keep water from pooling in the middle. In heavy rain 7-8 feet high is fine for a coverage height, but my husband Ka did manage to burn a small hole into a tarp roof when a palm frond got a little too high with the flames.
I think the best impromptu hearths, beyond having cement blocks if available, are going to be made of three or perhaps four long burner log pieces used as stabilizers for say a metal rack in the middle for cooking. This gives enough space in the middle for kindling and medium burners and things can be moved in as they burn.
Persistence pays off. This is the last thing I will say about this. I’ve had dozens of times something doesn’t want to light and even a few times medium burning things just stopped burning in the rain. In the early stages I nurse the fire constantly, moving things around and adding more kindling as needed. Sometimes I let some wet leaves sit on top of the embers of medium burners until they dry out and hopefully spark. There’s a lot of smoke from this and it can take several minutes. I’m not an expert here at all, but my experience tells me one counterintuitive thing: most people in the real world may have a far bigger problem starting a fire than putting it out. They just might not know that if they live in 13% humidity…
Do you have any fun experiences firestarting?
Great suggestions! I’ve never started a fire in the rain; nor, have I tried. My husband has, but years ago. You’re right in saying it’s an important skill to cultivate.
I used to go camping a lot in the 90s and we would make fires. Always plenty of newspaper in our bags! In humid weather, one thing that worked was cooking oil as it sustains the flame long enough to dry the wood.