The proprietor at GoingGear sent me some Firesteel along with a few of those waterproof pill capsules and lighters awhile ago. I use one of the pill capsules to hold my lock’s combination when I’m swimming since my brain is too fried to remember a sequence of three random numbers; it’s worked well so far. My guy at GoingGear probably assumed I knew how to use Firesteel since Backcountry.com trusts me to write their blog, but the truth is that I just banged the rod against some metal for awhile after it arrived. I saw some sparks, figured it’d be pretty hard to get a fire started from that one spark, and I packed it away in my survival kit. I put it in the survival kit on the assumption that I’d figure out how to use it if my life ever depended on it.

Then at the recent Outdoor Retailer tradeshow, I was looking at some of the random cool stuff sold by Light My Fire, and I picked up the Firesteel at their booth. My friend and I knocked it against some metal and saw sparks. An extremely tall man approached and asked if we wanted to know how to use Firesteel. He tried to explain the pressure and scraping motion, but eventually we had to hand the Firesteel over since we couldn’t get it right. In this guy’s hands the Firesteel was like a flaming waterfall–you could have lit a wet towel, but he said he mostly uses dryer lint. I’ve been practicing with Firesteel and can get pretty close to those results now, but I’m not consistent. No one really needs Firesteel, but it’s one of those things that’s fun to play with (like matches) and could certainly replace all your other fire-starting techniques once you master it.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 9:44 am and is filed under Backpacking, Camping, Gear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.