The place where you start your fire will have a huge impact on how easy and fast it will go. In a good place, the fire also lasts longer and is easier to ignite. Unfortunately, for people moving in really extreme icy conditions, finding a really dry place is almost impossible. Even lighting a fire in complete humidity can be simplified by following the following few tips and tricks.

First of all: you should have a field shovel in your backpack, or a small spade or something. You can certainly use a stick, but we are talking about frozen ground here, against which iron certainly has the best chance. However, whatever tool you choose, dig with it until you remove the wet soil with it until you have removed the worst from the damp ground. This will give your fire a kind of „pool“ in which it will be able to burn longer and not smoke as much.

It is not a bad idea to place two large wet trunks about half a meter apart and then pour wet needles and similar remnants of trees between them. It is also important that the fire is never directly on the snow, but clearly and always on the ground or on this platform, where everything is separated from the surroundings by wet wood and sprinkled with crushed stone. Making a fire right on the snow is a waste of time – it melts the snow, falls into the snow and goes out.

An accelerated (and definitely less labor-intensive choice) is to put pieces of damp branches / wood on the ground roughly to the width of the planned fire and then light the dry wood on it. The result is the same – dry wood will catch and moist under it will maintain the structure.

If you find a place where there will be some natural natural cover above you (rock overhang, the mouth of a cave, branches of giant trees, but the piece of your shelter that you have just built is also great,…), the better. Any small bonus that will help you ignite a fire is a clear plus – it saves your effort and fuel and all ignition tools (standard with a limited number of uses – except for a magnifying glass, yes) The sun is known to be a renewable resource for a few billion more flight).

However, if you intend to sleep outside and leave the fire unattended, it is not recommended to leave it too close to other tree trunks / any plastic things. Under the ground it can burn to another tree, which is dangerous for about fifty reasons (even in winter it can catch a snowy forest with a powerful fire, CO (carbon monoxide) from smoldering wood can suffocate you, a piece of burning tree falls on you, a backpack from man-made fibers,…).

If you have strength, an ax, time and large woods, then the absolutely excellent thing is to split the logs and make a fire on them. Paradoxically, even the most wet logs from which snow drips usually have very dry inner parts, so if you help them with longitudinal splitting and revealing, you will get a perfect dry surface for your fire.