Survivorman's Secrets of Survival s01e01 Episode Script
Fire
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It's our most ancient skill.
Without it, survival would just not be possible.
I have created fire! -- Captions by vitac -- captions paid for by discovery communications ONE MAN ALONE NO FOOD NO T.
V.
CREW Survivorman Secrets of Survival: Fire What's the number-one thing to take with you into a survival situation -- the number-one item? For me, it's a way to get a fire going.
I can cook my food, boil my water, signal rescuers, stay warm, and at night, keep the fear away.
Everything else can be dealt with.
If I can get a fire going, especially if I don't have matches or a lighter, that can be the difference between life and death.
These are my top five ways of making fire in a survival situation, based on years of being out there without the advantage of having a lighter or box full of matches.
Each one, for me, is better than the last, and I'll tell you why.
Before we begin the countdown, let's take a look at a few other important aspects of fire during survival, and throughout this hour, I'll share with you the secrets of fire making.
If I am able to get a fire going, I'm going to need to be able to travel with it.
I'm just working on a fire bundle.
Carrying your fire from one location to another sounds at first like a daunting task, yet in any survival situation, being able to have fire is so vital that I'll protect it like it's another person just as in need of staying alive as I am.
The principles are easy.
Start small on the inside and gradually work your way out with the material getting coarser.
The secret is the constant adjusting of the binding so that it neither blows into flame nor snuffs out while you hike.
If I take a coconut, and there's tons of all this coconut fiber.
This stuff is really good.
It'll hold an ember, and fill up the cup.
And simply find myself a coal and put in there.
And all I have to do is just keep that sort of smoldering while I walk.
I grabbed some vinyl from the truck to use to wrap around it.
I just got to tie it up.
Create a little hole there and shove in all the rest of my fine, fine, fine shredded bark.
Instead of doing sort of traditional fire bundle, I might as well make use of the tin can.
Some cow dung.
And I've got myself a modern twist on a fire bundle.
It's smoking well.
Hopefully, it'll last the trip.
Worked absolutely perfectly.
If it flamed up, I kind of snuffed it out a bit, and now all I have to do is add some twigs and some grass and blow it into flame, and I'm in business.
Worked like a charm.
One big fat cigar.
I was almost getting ready to leave, and I was trying to think, "okay, how am I gonna carry the fire now?" And then all of a sudden, it occurred to me.
Hang on a second.
I still have three of these babies left.
My friend in survival, david holladay, said to me one day, "why don't you just carry a cigar? It is, after all, a ready-made fire bundle.
" There we go.
Instant fire carrier.
I've got two more of these cigars, and I'm sure if I just sort of hold them and let the wind work on them, with any luck at all, that'll last me through to wherever it is I end up tonight.
Trying to build a shelter that has a fire inside is extremely difficult, yet if I can do it, it's a huge advantage.
I stay warm through the night, I feel protected.
That little flame is really exciting.
But it's very hard to make it safe, and I always run the risk of actually burning down my shelter in the process.
First time in my life, my shelter caught fire.
You should've seen it.
It was a big ball of flame in the sky.
If carrying a fire sounds difficult but proves not to be so, well, having a fire inside your shelter is just as difficult as it sounds.
The secret is to build a long and low fire along the length of your body.
It can be tedious to maintain, but if it works, it's a life saver.
The fire did not go to where the plastic was on the roof.
It was over in the fire area where the flames were supposed to lick up, but I guess they just kept drying out and drying out the wood up above it, and I let the flames get too high.
Wow.
Even inside a car, there are ways to add just a little bit of heat.
There we go.
One-candle heat.
Let's hope it's enough to take the edge off of the cold inside this car.
I'm not a believer in small survival fires.
I want to have the biggest fire, the hottest fire.
I want my rescuers to be able to zero in on it.
For me, a survival fire is a safe one but a big one.
Whoo-hoo! Oh, tell me that wasn't a thing of beauty.
I love it when a plan works out.
One secret that I like to believe is my very own is the concept of covering my fire with big rotting logs before heavy rain comes.
It creates an oven-like fire that will still be going when the rain stops.
Once I get a fire big enough like this, I can use punky wood and burn it, as well.
See, that's the key.
If you've got a big fire, those coals will still be there when you come back after a reconnaissance mission or gathering wild edibles or getting more firewood, and if it starts to rain and you put over some big punky logs and you protect that fire, it'll keep going until long after the rain has stopped.
I'm in here somewhere.
Just a couple of big punky logs laid overtop of my fire, and just let to smolder and burn underneath, and pouring rain -- it just poured on me, torrential downpour with thunder and lighting for about an hour and a half straight.
And my fire's still going.
The beauty of a big fire is that it can be seen from the sky, and that makes it a powerful way to signal for help.
It hasn't been all that often when I've needed to get a signal fire going while filming "survivorman," but there have been a few occasions where getting noticed from afar was everything.
A signal fire that you can keep burning all hours of the day and night would be extremely difficult to maintain.
Remember, the point is to go home, so signaling methods are vital to survival.
The secret is to be able to light the fire within seconds of your potential rescuers in the sky showing up.
Let's set up a spot in the open here.
We get a fire going.
We can cook up the bird, and it'll be a signal, hopefully, for the plane at the same time.
A chopper.
Hopefully, it'll come back.
He was following us overtop.
It's right overtop of us.
Make sure we don't burn those other trees.
Got smoke going.
Chopper in the air.
If we can keep the fire going -- just the sticks underneath, some evergreen boughs, but when we throw on that sphagnum moss, it really makes a lot of smoke.
Sooner or later, they got to see the smoke.
And smoke is the key.
Nice dry wood won't give you that.
It's got to be something damp, but not so much so that you put the fire out.
The secret is to have a strong, hot flame underneath topped by anything that will give lots of smoke, from rubber and plastic to evergreen boughs and moss.
Whatever it takes, but be prepared.
It'll be frantic no matter how ready you think you are.
Now that is some great search and rescue.
Unbelievable.
Here now from the year 2000 is my very first attempt at a signal fire.
I've taken the spruce roots, and I've tied around from pull to pull and back up to pull.
Tied up at the top, and for strength, and then I've done, like, a lacing with some more spruce roots across the bottom to create, like, mesh on the bottom and also on the sides so that stuff doesn't blow out of the sides.
I'll do the same across the front once I'm done.
But the next stage, basically, is to get all my birch bark and all of my tinder and stuff like that and to shove it in there and get it all in there with lots dangling down at the bottom so that it's ready to go.
Transporting fire, putting it inside a shelter, using it to signal a rescuer.
There are as many uses for fire during survival as there are places to get lost.
As a skill itself, the ability to get a fire going anywhere at any time is quite possibly the most important skill you can learn.
Think I'm rescued.
Can you set up a tarp and get a big fire going after three or four days of solid rain? If you can't, start practicing.
Triangle tripod formation held up really well in the storm.
It was blown on all night.
Thought it was gonna blow over, but it's stood straight and strong.
The boughs helped to shed the rain, so the birch bark wasn't so wet, and I couldn't get this.
What are my top methods for getting a fire going? Well, short of having a lighter or a box of matches, I've discovered dozens of ways to keep myself warm and safe.
I've placed them in an order that, for my personal skill level, goes from the most difficult -- my number five -- to the most assured -- my number one.
These are my top-five methods of fire starting during a survival ordeal.
Stay with me while I create fire.
Yeah, baby.
The number-five method for fire starting in survival -- the hand drill and vine friction.
This is not going to be easy.
Fire by friction can be really tough.
Here we go.
Some vine.
But in the jungle, it's amazing that it's even possible at all.
This method is one of the oldest forms of fire making.
Not so good.
All right.
Let's try this again.
Come on, baby.
Don't break on me this time.
I can make a coal this way in a matter of seconds, but each day is different than the last, and if every little component is not just right, I run out of strength, materials, and patience.
Well, I have gotten fire using this vine method out here.
Just not today.
When I was with the hewa in papua new guinea, I was able to have much greater success with their guidance.
There he goes.
Look at that.
Even in a rainy place, a dry vine rubbed quickly against a small, dry piece of wood will still create enough heat to burn.
The tough part is remembering to breathe in this hunched-over position.
Hey.
So, with these guys, matches are premium when someone like I come into the village.
Leave the matches, that's cool, but sooner or later, those matches run out, and they all, even the young ones, have got to know how to do this.
From the wet jungle, we go to the desert.
First I'm gonna give a good effort to get fire going by using the traditional method of this area -- the hand drill.
I found this spindle just while I was down getting the carrizo cane.
It's a piece of seep-willow, and the baseboard that I'm using is one of the ribs of the saguaro cactus, all dead and dried out, and I've just sort of whittled it down to be the right shape for me to work with here.
The other thing I did was make this fire lay over here ready to go.
Just a stick stuck in the ground, and then all the other -- the heavier wood put on top.
That way, when your grass goes underneath to light up, the heavy wood doesn't crush it and you can get a nice, good aerated fire to get it going.
Now, to do this right, first I had to just find the right place, and then once I've got the spindle settling on the baseboard, I cut out a little notch, and that'll give a place for all the hot dust to fall down into.
And what I was showing was to try and keep this motion going -- to do the kind of the itsy, bitsy spider move.
You practice that for a while to get the motion right of what it is you want to do while you make this thing spin.
Fire by friction is all about the feel.
With that said, until you get that feel, it can be very physical and exhausting.
The secret is to breathe and try to relax.
When you're spinning really hard, if you're just spinning in one spot like this and you're just doing little short ones, it's a lot tougher to get it going, so that's the motion I want to try and keep happening.
And the last thing is, as you can see, I've been practicing -- from these blister marks, it's really easy to get blisters doing this, and so as soon as you're sort of stopped, you smack your hands together really hard -- so hard that it hurts -- but that rushes the blood back into the skin and helps any way to prevent the blisters from coming on.
Let's give this a try.
The combination of all the physical and technical aspects of getting this to work is mind boggling.
First, the wood has to be perfectly dry.
It has to be the right type of wood for both the spindle and the baseboard.
Even the air can't be too humid, or the wood will soak up the moisture like a sponge and be unusable.
The size of the notch cut most be just right.
Too big and the dust won't pack together into a hot ember, and too small and it won't have enough room to form.
I have to keep the spindle perfectly straight and maintain a downward pressure the whole time without it slipping out of my hands or out of the base at the bottom.
While doing that, I have to keep it spinning constantly to create enough heat.
Each time I stop spinning, the area of friction between the two pieces of wood cools down a fraction.
And remember, all I'm really trying to do is make a delicate little pile of hot wood dust that ignites on its own into a little ember.
Yeah, baby.
Ooh, doesn't that look good? Whoo! It's gonna be a warm night, and it's gonna keep the peccaries and the mountain lions away from me.
In the kalahari desert, I had the chance to survive with the san bushmen.
Thought to be the genetic line direct from the first humans, it only goes to follow that the hand-drill method of fire starting originated with them and is still in use today.
In our modern world, children learn fast about things like how to take the bus to school or ride a bike.
In places like this, they learn how to make fire from the land.
The elders' method of using a hand drill is what my own method was mirrored from, but notice the difference.
There's a smoothness in his skill that comes from a life of making fires this way, yet just like it was for me in arizona, the details are the same on the other side of the world.
The delicate balance must be struck if hot wood dust is to be ground out from the friction this man is giving to it.
All he has now is a pile of smoldering dust, and the secret here is to remember that you don't yet have a fire.
The job is not done until you can walk away and get larger pieces of wood to add to the flames.
I would guess that the first fires were simply collected after lightning strikes.
The hand drill is when we took charge of fire and made it work for us.
We were, I am sure, too impatient to wait for lightning.
Whoever first figured this method out held the secret to fire, and from there, we became a civilized species.
That's the way I do it, too.
Yeah.
It's funny how fire-starting methods around the world seem to have evolved in the same manner.
Thousands and thousands of kilometers apart, yet still, pretty much, tribes everywhere learn to start fire the very same way -- they're rubbing some sticks together.
The hand drill, to me, is such a beautiful and organic way to get a fire going, but up next, fire starting isn't always pretty.
If you look around you in a survival situation, you'll quickly learn that just about anything can be used to ignite a fire.
There's matches inside, so that's not a problem.
But still, just to conserve, and some of this old duct tape, I'm gonna use that to light the fire.
Combine modern technology with wood, and you have yourself a quick survival fire.
One thing about duct tape, it's good fire starter.
The number-four method in fire starting for survival -- using man-made tinders.
Potassium permanganate, an antiseptic.
Glycerin for diarrhea.
Watch what happens when you put them both together.
The chemical makeup of everything from duct tape to liquid soap can be highly flammable.
That's what happens when you put the two of them together.
There we go.
Now I'm gonna put these corn chips in, believe it or not.
All that effort and a couple of corn chips was worth it.
Duct tape, glycerin, and corn chips were not meant to make fire, but they sure work.
I'll show you what I mean about those corn chips.
Look.
See that? And it holds its flame just like a little tiny candle.
So, if you don't have much tinder and you happen to have some corn chips in your pocket like I did, then it's a great way to help get your fire going.
I like to go into the stores and grab those last-minute survival items.
You know, it just says "general survival" aisle.
And just to test them out.
So, I grabbed some stuff that is some kind of -- well, they call it fire dust.
We'll see what that's like.
To go with it, I've got one match.
The secret to using store-bought emergency fire-starting tinder is actually knowing the down side, and that is that for most of them, you still need a flame to begin with.
They won't ignite on just a spark.
That said, once you can light them with a flame, they maintain it long enough to build up your fire and help to keep it going.
All right.
So far so good with this dust.
And that's what I like to see.
We have fire, folks.
Using chemicals intended for fire starting bought from the camping store or just figuring out what materials around you contain flammable chemicals can save you a lot of effort searching in the forest for tinders.
Some simple hand sanitizer and a spark.
And we've got fire.
Petroleum jelly.
And mixed in with the cotton.
Take a flint sparker here.
See that? Cotton takes the flame real well and holds it.
Birch bark comes in.
And I've got myself a very fast fire.
So, I've got a piece of this cotton, and there was some toilet paper, but the way I'm gonna make them last is I've got some lip balm.
So, I'm gonna utilize this wax In both places -- I'm gonna put it on the cotton from the first-aid kit and on the toilet paper.
And that should really hold the flame.
The one-match fire you do not want to miss.
It's got to take.
Whether toilet paper, cotton balls, or the ends of q-tips, cotton and wax combined is often my go-to fire starter.
Success.
Let's find out if this works.
If it does, I can heat up some water.
On this occasion in norway, I tried some chemical pellets meant for survival.
The fumes were toxic and horrible, but the heat and speed of the fire was undeniably advantageous.
Even this little flame, as chemical as it is, feels great.
I like this little survival stove.
It's getting a thumbs up in my book, I think.
Whereas the hand drill requires a great deal of skill, and using chemical fire starters means you needed to have brought them in with you, these next two methods quickly became favorites of mine because they connected me emotionally and physically to the mountain men of old.
A spark.
Sometimes all you have is a spark.
But if you have something to catch that spark, you can make a quick fire and continue to survive.
Pioneers had rock and steel, but we bettered that with the addition of magnesium.
The number-three method in fire starting for survival -- flint strikers and rock and steel.
Every time I come out and try survival in a new location, I like to test some kind of survival item just to see how it works.
This time around, I'm gonna try this little item -- magnesium flint stick.
What I want to do is shave off this magnesium.
I need to make a little pile.
Got to be real patient.
Drop a lighter or a pack of matches in the water and you're out of luck.
Drop this striker in the water, and with a wipe of your shirt, it'll still work just as well.
Well, that's not a bad pile.
We'll see.
I just don't know.
Magnesium.
Some flint strikers come only with the sparker, no magnesium.
There we go.
There we go.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Burn, baby, burn.
The secret to this kind of striker with the magnesium bar attached is that you don't need to find any tinder to catch the spark.
That little magnesium stick is definitely a winner in my book.
Hey.
If the sparking device doesn't have magnesium attached, that's still okay, 'cause there are often many different types of fluffy tinders around like cattails or milkweed.
But if you're carrying bullets, as most hunters would, then your gunpowder will take a spark quite nicely.
And by the way, more hunters are caught in survival situations every year than all the other types of wilderness travelers combined.
Shotgun shell.
Basic striker here.
Beautiful, strong spark.
Got gunpowder from the shell.
Let's give it a shot here.
Here we go.
There we go.
There we go! Hey! Bingo! The thing about getting a fire going, you've really got to seek out dry tinder, dry brush and twigs, and you can find it.
Even if it's been raining all week, you can find it underneath logs, underneath rock overhangs, and take your time.
If you take a long time to get all of this dry tinder, you will get a fire going.
This time, I'm gonna use, basically, the traditional pioneer method.
They didn't have their packs of matches or lighters to carry around.
What they did have was steel -- something with a high carbon element -- and rock, and let's not get into what different kinds of rocks you can spark with.
If you're lost, just find a rock that'll spark if you happen to be lucky enough to have some steel with a high carbon element in it.
Ow.
Haven't done this in a while.
Last thing you need is a way.
What's happening here is you're coming down and shaving off tiny little slivers of metal, and they're shooting away melting -- melted -- and they need something to land on.
So what you need is something to catch that little spark and then hold a glow.
So, you try to get the spark to land on it.
Just like the wood you might use in fire by friction, even the humidity in the air can affect how well this charred cloth will take a spark, and in this clip, I'm in far northern ontario, and the nighttime temperatures are dipping 40 degrees below zero.
Not a good start.
So this fire was vital to my survival.
The cloth is 100% cotton that's been put inside a closed metal can and charred through.
Any natural fiber can work, but my secret is using blue-jeans cotton.
Oh, boy.
Lots of good sparks, but the cloth isn't holding it.
That's not a good sign.
Remember "jeremiah johnson"? Robert redford sat there in the bush trying to get a fire going.
This is exactly the method he was using.
Another secret to this is the feel.
A smooth striking method will be far more effective than hard hitting.
Got her.
All right.
What I've got now is this piece of charred cloth is just holding a little ember -- a little glow.
I think you might be able to see that.
That gives me some time to put it in my tinder bundle, which is this collection of dried grass and spanish moss, cedar bark that's been all schmucked up there and sort of broken up and that.
And try to make yourself a little furnace here.
Keeping any breeze at my back and my hands underneath the heat, I blow up and into the bundle.
Whoo.
Close.
Make sure you got all your other tinder ready, and of course, birch bark is a perfect tinder -- full of oils.
Even when it's soaking wet, it'll burn well.
Oh.
And you're in business.
"Now, why should you bother carrying a piece of rock and steel," you might ask? If you found a way to get a spark like that, you can extend the life of your lighter and your matches and not even have to use them, and that may matter a great deal if all you have is a handful of three or four matches on your person.
Hand drills and steel strikers are somewhat romantic methods for fire starting, and man-made emergency tinder is a very effective improvement, but up next, anything goes.
Over the years, getting a fire going in a survival situation, whether it's raining or dry, hot or cold, became somewhat of a personal challenge for me.
There were a lot of times that I would head out, and I would know what I was going to do.
I knew I was going to do a fire bow or a hand drill because I was in a certain situation.
But there are a lot of other times where I just took it as it came at me.
I had no idea how I was gonna get my fire going or how I was gonna make use of whatever was available to me.
The number-two method in fire starting for survival -- anything goes.
I have started fires by hitting rock and steel together Oh, that's beautiful.
spinning a piece of wood with my hand Gasoline and a spark I don't like playing with gasoline.
Okay.
Yeah.
Hey! Whoo! batteries A little 12-volt battery.
Steel wool.
Touch it to this terminal here.
Oh.
flashlight.
What I need to do is break the bulb without breaking the filament inside the bulb.
There's the bulb in there.
All I got to do is turn it on.
Yeah.
Even started a fire using chocolate and a can.
Just a little bit of chocolate.
And apparently, I can take the chocolate, polish up -- with the wax that's in the chocolate -- polish up the bottom of this can.
The idea is the concave nature of the bottom of the can should focus a beam of sunlight into the tinder and start it up just like you would use a magnifying glass.
Hard to do.
There's light there, and it's just coming back onto the grass right there.
For years, people have been sending me their ideas on survival, and fire starting is always at the top of the list.
Amazing.
Absolutely amazing.
I really didn't think I had a hope in anywhere of getting a fire going with a piece of chocolate, some sand, and the bottom of a pop can.
You can make a fire with that lighter without fluid.
First I'm gonna sacrifice one of these pieces of tissue.
And what I want to do is just first just take it and roll it up.
Need a little bit of a sort of funnel -- funnel-like opening.
The next thing that I want to do is turn to my socks here and pull off a good wad of sock lint.
Just try to get, oh, I don't know, maybe a dime-sized amount of lint.
Just put the fluff in this top end of the tissue paper, and we have the makings of what I'm going to call a prison match.
This is how people often get a fire going even just to light their cigarettes in prison when they ran out of fluid, since lighters are at a premium there.
Don't ask me how I know that.
No flame.
Success.
Right off the bat.
The first one, too.
Nice.
Nice.
Nice.
Yeah.
See if I can get a fire going.
Gonna harvest the power from the batteries -- three double as -- to see if I can make fire.
That's where the bulb would go.
And I'm gonna just take the wires right off of this piece here.
Theoretically, I should be able to attach those two wires and perhaps create a hot enough bit of wire to make fire with some cotton.
So, we're gonna give this a shot.
One piece of cotton batting down on the pile.
Here comes a lucky battery.
Not sure if that's gonna work or not.
That's really hot.
Got me some smoke.
And let that sit.
It's very hot.
But I can't believe it works.
An l.
E.
D.
Flashlight, taking the back off, attaching the wires to each other, and then simply turning it on, and it was hot enough to get that cotton batting to ignite.
It's fire time, and I've only got one paper match.
If I'm very, very careful, I can split it right down the center, turn it into two matches.
Okay.
Here we go.
One match has now become two.
The whole point of these crazy methods is to extend your ability to get a fire going as often as needed without using up your matches or lighter fluid.
I'm gonna try something new for getting a fire going.
I've got all the stuffing from the coconut tree.
Add a bit of gasoline.
There we go.
This is a rescue tube -- diver's rescue tube.
And usually, things kept in it are items like matches, lighters, and often, in my case anyway, I have flares.
These things tend to shoot really far.
Wish me luck, folks.
Here we go.
This is potentially a dangerous method for starting a fire, but it does illustrate just how important fire is in a survival situation.
Whatever it takes, you got to have a fire.
What happened there was there's my flare.
See, you just pull down on this lever, and boom, you shoot the flare.
And normally it goes flying up into the sky, so I just had everything closed in there with the rock up top.
Shoot that right into it.
Come on, baby, burn.
Here we go.
That's what I like to see.
And I'll bet you that would work whether there was gasoline or not, so it's a good thing to know.
Flare, big bundle of dry tinder, protect it with a rock, and you've got yourself a good fire.
So, I've got dried wood, dry grass, and little arctic flowers that have already gone to seed, so they're fluffy.
Sounds to me like the makings of a fire.
I had often heard that it was possible to remove the projectile from a bullet and fire the powder still left in the shell into dry tinder to make fire.
The original pioneers did use their flintlock rifles to start their fires, but not quite this way.
It proved to be easier said than done, and here in the high arctic, it took several tries before I finally noticed a tiny glowing bit of tinder fluff waiting to be coaxed into a flame.
Ooh.
Hang on.
Hang on.
Hang on.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Oh, man.
Hey, there we go.
100% cotton.
So, my bandana's 100% cotton.
That's a really good thing 'cause I'm gonna make use of it.
Just use enough so I can still wear it.
What I want to do is I want to rough it up, break up the fibers so that it's somehow kind of fluffy.
I've looked around the desert here, and I'm just not seeing anything fluffy.
Lots of pointy and prickly and stabby things, but nothing fluffy.
There we go.
Just breaking up these fibers nicely so I can pull them apart with my fingers.
I'll start off with this small piece -- see if I can do it.
Hopefully, that'll do the trick.
Let's keep all this small stuff right there ready.
Shove the cigar in.
Blow.
And I think the beauty of this is I might be able to actually blow from the end of the cigar -- from the non-lit end -- to make this work.
Hmm.
This is gonna be tricky.
Here in mexico, it turned out that the only piece of non-synthetic material I had was my bandana, but it was worth the sacrifice.
And that's the secret about anything goes being ready to sacrifice something to make fire.
I got fire.
Up next is my number-one method, and it wasn't easy deciding.
I had to go with a way that I myself could pull off fairly easily and a way that didn't require having anything more than what the surrounding landscape provided, and the bonus to my chosen method is that the act of doing it alone would always warm me up, even before I got the flames of fire.
And the number-one method in fire starting for survival -- my personal favorite -- the fire bow.
In the year 2001, though I'd been successful with a fire bow 1,000 times before, it was here in northern ontario where, for the first time, getting this fire going really mattered to my survival.
You know what? I'm getting smoke, but my notch is not close enough to the hole.
The dust is just scattering around.
The temperatures had soared during a record-breaking heat wave, and I'd been dropped off alone for the first time ever to film myself surviving.
I was nervous on all levels, and nothing was working.
Even my bootlaces on the bow were not performing as usual.
Aw.
My bootlace is broken.
I've doubled the bootlace to hopefully make it stronger.
Boy, this is one of the toughest I've ever had to do.
And you know, I've done hundreds of these fires.
But this setup is not optimum.
It's not working for me for some reason.
The bugs were bad and there was not much to eat, but still, I had to get fire.
This area was prone to big storms, and it wouldn't be long before another one came in on me.
The days were long, so I had plenty of daylight, but time was still running away, and many hours passed working hard at it under the scorching sun.
Oh, god.
So close.
With cedar from trees close to the shore of the lake as my bottom baseboard piece, I used poplar wood for the spindle.
I started using my bootlaces for the bow, but they kept breaking on me as I continued trying different combinations of wood.
And every time I stopped, I focused my eyes on the dust I'd created, hoping to see a little wisp of smoke, but nothing.
If I don't get it this time, I got to take a break.
String broke.
Down to one string.
You can see here, out of desperation, that I move my right hand up and how tightly I'm holding the bow.
I'm moving my hand up the bow to keep the string from loosening and it's not working.
After five hours of attempts, I'd broken all my bootlaces and I had to start all over.
This time, I'd cut off the bottom end of my shirt and twisted it together into a string I could use on the bow.
Piece on the top that I used to push it all down is called the bearing block.
In this case, it was just any piece of wood that would fit in my palm nicely.
Oh, man.
By the time I had finally got the dust hot enough to ignite, I'd spent nearly 11 hours on it.
It's very important here that I don't jump up 'cause I could kick everything flying.
It's very tender.
Okay.
All right.
I got to be really gentle.
11 hours of effort and 7 days of survival were riding on this tiny and fragile little ember formed from the hot wood dust.
Not a very optimistic beginning, I know, but over the next 10 years, I'd have a chance to attempt it again and again in places like mexico, costa rica, and northern ontario.
I've never had so much trouble getting a fire going.
Oh, yeah.
Whoo! Got my fire bow, which is just a bow and this bootlace.
And a spindle -- straight and dead and dry -- and then to push it all down, I've got this bearing block.
I can put the spindle right up in here, and I think I'll be able to hold it down.
It'll be my bearing block, basically.
Put a little hole in here to start off.
Can see the edge out there.
And hopefully, that little notch there will give it a place -- all the ash -- a place to fall.
Let's give this a shot.
Wish me luck.
I've always preferred to go barefoot, even in the snow, when I attempt the fire bow.
I find that I get a good feel for the baseboard underneath my foot and that I can manipulate it and move it around a little if I need to.
I always found that keeping my big hiking boots on added the risk of knocking the setup flying when I lift my foot off, and thereby destroying the little ember I was creating in the first place.
And I come off it real careful.
Here we go.
Transfer.
When I first began filming survival, it took me over 11 hours to create fire using the fire bow.
I was now able to make it all happen in just a few minutes.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
There we go.
Whoo! Touch and go.
Whoo! Yeah.
That is sweet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's how it's done.
Having a fire changes almost everything in a survival situation.
It creates psychological comfort, cooks your food, keeps you warm, keeps away predators, signals rescuers, boils water, making it safe to drink.
It can even be used to make tools, so it follows that one of the most important survival skills you can have is the ability to create fire.
But not only create it, move it, manipulate it, contain it, and maintain it over a long period of time.
These were my top five methods, but truth be told, I'd rather head out into the wilderness with a lighter and a box of matches any day.
Some scenes may contain graphic content, language and nudity which may not be suitable for all audience.
Viewer discretion is strongly advised.
It's our most ancient skill.
Without it, survival would just not be possible.
I have created fire! -- Captions by vitac -- captions paid for by discovery communications ONE MAN ALONE NO FOOD NO T.
V.
CREW Survivorman Secrets of Survival: Fire What's the number-one thing to take with you into a survival situation -- the number-one item? For me, it's a way to get a fire going.
I can cook my food, boil my water, signal rescuers, stay warm, and at night, keep the fear away.
Everything else can be dealt with.
If I can get a fire going, especially if I don't have matches or a lighter, that can be the difference between life and death.
These are my top five ways of making fire in a survival situation, based on years of being out there without the advantage of having a lighter or box full of matches.
Each one, for me, is better than the last, and I'll tell you why.
Before we begin the countdown, let's take a look at a few other important aspects of fire during survival, and throughout this hour, I'll share with you the secrets of fire making.
If I am able to get a fire going, I'm going to need to be able to travel with it.
I'm just working on a fire bundle.
Carrying your fire from one location to another sounds at first like a daunting task, yet in any survival situation, being able to have fire is so vital that I'll protect it like it's another person just as in need of staying alive as I am.
The principles are easy.
Start small on the inside and gradually work your way out with the material getting coarser.
The secret is the constant adjusting of the binding so that it neither blows into flame nor snuffs out while you hike.
If I take a coconut, and there's tons of all this coconut fiber.
This stuff is really good.
It'll hold an ember, and fill up the cup.
And simply find myself a coal and put in there.
And all I have to do is just keep that sort of smoldering while I walk.
I grabbed some vinyl from the truck to use to wrap around it.
I just got to tie it up.
Create a little hole there and shove in all the rest of my fine, fine, fine shredded bark.
Instead of doing sort of traditional fire bundle, I might as well make use of the tin can.
Some cow dung.
And I've got myself a modern twist on a fire bundle.
It's smoking well.
Hopefully, it'll last the trip.
Worked absolutely perfectly.
If it flamed up, I kind of snuffed it out a bit, and now all I have to do is add some twigs and some grass and blow it into flame, and I'm in business.
Worked like a charm.
One big fat cigar.
I was almost getting ready to leave, and I was trying to think, "okay, how am I gonna carry the fire now?" And then all of a sudden, it occurred to me.
Hang on a second.
I still have three of these babies left.
My friend in survival, david holladay, said to me one day, "why don't you just carry a cigar? It is, after all, a ready-made fire bundle.
" There we go.
Instant fire carrier.
I've got two more of these cigars, and I'm sure if I just sort of hold them and let the wind work on them, with any luck at all, that'll last me through to wherever it is I end up tonight.
Trying to build a shelter that has a fire inside is extremely difficult, yet if I can do it, it's a huge advantage.
I stay warm through the night, I feel protected.
That little flame is really exciting.
But it's very hard to make it safe, and I always run the risk of actually burning down my shelter in the process.
First time in my life, my shelter caught fire.
You should've seen it.
It was a big ball of flame in the sky.
If carrying a fire sounds difficult but proves not to be so, well, having a fire inside your shelter is just as difficult as it sounds.
The secret is to build a long and low fire along the length of your body.
It can be tedious to maintain, but if it works, it's a life saver.
The fire did not go to where the plastic was on the roof.
It was over in the fire area where the flames were supposed to lick up, but I guess they just kept drying out and drying out the wood up above it, and I let the flames get too high.
Wow.
Even inside a car, there are ways to add just a little bit of heat.
There we go.
One-candle heat.
Let's hope it's enough to take the edge off of the cold inside this car.
I'm not a believer in small survival fires.
I want to have the biggest fire, the hottest fire.
I want my rescuers to be able to zero in on it.
For me, a survival fire is a safe one but a big one.
Whoo-hoo! Oh, tell me that wasn't a thing of beauty.
I love it when a plan works out.
One secret that I like to believe is my very own is the concept of covering my fire with big rotting logs before heavy rain comes.
It creates an oven-like fire that will still be going when the rain stops.
Once I get a fire big enough like this, I can use punky wood and burn it, as well.
See, that's the key.
If you've got a big fire, those coals will still be there when you come back after a reconnaissance mission or gathering wild edibles or getting more firewood, and if it starts to rain and you put over some big punky logs and you protect that fire, it'll keep going until long after the rain has stopped.
I'm in here somewhere.
Just a couple of big punky logs laid overtop of my fire, and just let to smolder and burn underneath, and pouring rain -- it just poured on me, torrential downpour with thunder and lighting for about an hour and a half straight.
And my fire's still going.
The beauty of a big fire is that it can be seen from the sky, and that makes it a powerful way to signal for help.
It hasn't been all that often when I've needed to get a signal fire going while filming "survivorman," but there have been a few occasions where getting noticed from afar was everything.
A signal fire that you can keep burning all hours of the day and night would be extremely difficult to maintain.
Remember, the point is to go home, so signaling methods are vital to survival.
The secret is to be able to light the fire within seconds of your potential rescuers in the sky showing up.
Let's set up a spot in the open here.
We get a fire going.
We can cook up the bird, and it'll be a signal, hopefully, for the plane at the same time.
A chopper.
Hopefully, it'll come back.
He was following us overtop.
It's right overtop of us.
Make sure we don't burn those other trees.
Got smoke going.
Chopper in the air.
If we can keep the fire going -- just the sticks underneath, some evergreen boughs, but when we throw on that sphagnum moss, it really makes a lot of smoke.
Sooner or later, they got to see the smoke.
And smoke is the key.
Nice dry wood won't give you that.
It's got to be something damp, but not so much so that you put the fire out.
The secret is to have a strong, hot flame underneath topped by anything that will give lots of smoke, from rubber and plastic to evergreen boughs and moss.
Whatever it takes, but be prepared.
It'll be frantic no matter how ready you think you are.
Now that is some great search and rescue.
Unbelievable.
Here now from the year 2000 is my very first attempt at a signal fire.
I've taken the spruce roots, and I've tied around from pull to pull and back up to pull.
Tied up at the top, and for strength, and then I've done, like, a lacing with some more spruce roots across the bottom to create, like, mesh on the bottom and also on the sides so that stuff doesn't blow out of the sides.
I'll do the same across the front once I'm done.
But the next stage, basically, is to get all my birch bark and all of my tinder and stuff like that and to shove it in there and get it all in there with lots dangling down at the bottom so that it's ready to go.
Transporting fire, putting it inside a shelter, using it to signal a rescuer.
There are as many uses for fire during survival as there are places to get lost.
As a skill itself, the ability to get a fire going anywhere at any time is quite possibly the most important skill you can learn.
Think I'm rescued.
Can you set up a tarp and get a big fire going after three or four days of solid rain? If you can't, start practicing.
Triangle tripod formation held up really well in the storm.
It was blown on all night.
Thought it was gonna blow over, but it's stood straight and strong.
The boughs helped to shed the rain, so the birch bark wasn't so wet, and I couldn't get this.
What are my top methods for getting a fire going? Well, short of having a lighter or a box of matches, I've discovered dozens of ways to keep myself warm and safe.
I've placed them in an order that, for my personal skill level, goes from the most difficult -- my number five -- to the most assured -- my number one.
These are my top-five methods of fire starting during a survival ordeal.
Stay with me while I create fire.
Yeah, baby.
The number-five method for fire starting in survival -- the hand drill and vine friction.
This is not going to be easy.
Fire by friction can be really tough.
Here we go.
Some vine.
But in the jungle, it's amazing that it's even possible at all.
This method is one of the oldest forms of fire making.
Not so good.
All right.
Let's try this again.
Come on, baby.
Don't break on me this time.
I can make a coal this way in a matter of seconds, but each day is different than the last, and if every little component is not just right, I run out of strength, materials, and patience.
Well, I have gotten fire using this vine method out here.
Just not today.
When I was with the hewa in papua new guinea, I was able to have much greater success with their guidance.
There he goes.
Look at that.
Even in a rainy place, a dry vine rubbed quickly against a small, dry piece of wood will still create enough heat to burn.
The tough part is remembering to breathe in this hunched-over position.
Hey.
So, with these guys, matches are premium when someone like I come into the village.
Leave the matches, that's cool, but sooner or later, those matches run out, and they all, even the young ones, have got to know how to do this.
From the wet jungle, we go to the desert.
First I'm gonna give a good effort to get fire going by using the traditional method of this area -- the hand drill.
I found this spindle just while I was down getting the carrizo cane.
It's a piece of seep-willow, and the baseboard that I'm using is one of the ribs of the saguaro cactus, all dead and dried out, and I've just sort of whittled it down to be the right shape for me to work with here.
The other thing I did was make this fire lay over here ready to go.
Just a stick stuck in the ground, and then all the other -- the heavier wood put on top.
That way, when your grass goes underneath to light up, the heavy wood doesn't crush it and you can get a nice, good aerated fire to get it going.
Now, to do this right, first I had to just find the right place, and then once I've got the spindle settling on the baseboard, I cut out a little notch, and that'll give a place for all the hot dust to fall down into.
And what I was showing was to try and keep this motion going -- to do the kind of the itsy, bitsy spider move.
You practice that for a while to get the motion right of what it is you want to do while you make this thing spin.
Fire by friction is all about the feel.
With that said, until you get that feel, it can be very physical and exhausting.
The secret is to breathe and try to relax.
When you're spinning really hard, if you're just spinning in one spot like this and you're just doing little short ones, it's a lot tougher to get it going, so that's the motion I want to try and keep happening.
And the last thing is, as you can see, I've been practicing -- from these blister marks, it's really easy to get blisters doing this, and so as soon as you're sort of stopped, you smack your hands together really hard -- so hard that it hurts -- but that rushes the blood back into the skin and helps any way to prevent the blisters from coming on.
Let's give this a try.
The combination of all the physical and technical aspects of getting this to work is mind boggling.
First, the wood has to be perfectly dry.
It has to be the right type of wood for both the spindle and the baseboard.
Even the air can't be too humid, or the wood will soak up the moisture like a sponge and be unusable.
The size of the notch cut most be just right.
Too big and the dust won't pack together into a hot ember, and too small and it won't have enough room to form.
I have to keep the spindle perfectly straight and maintain a downward pressure the whole time without it slipping out of my hands or out of the base at the bottom.
While doing that, I have to keep it spinning constantly to create enough heat.
Each time I stop spinning, the area of friction between the two pieces of wood cools down a fraction.
And remember, all I'm really trying to do is make a delicate little pile of hot wood dust that ignites on its own into a little ember.
Yeah, baby.
Ooh, doesn't that look good? Whoo! It's gonna be a warm night, and it's gonna keep the peccaries and the mountain lions away from me.
In the kalahari desert, I had the chance to survive with the san bushmen.
Thought to be the genetic line direct from the first humans, it only goes to follow that the hand-drill method of fire starting originated with them and is still in use today.
In our modern world, children learn fast about things like how to take the bus to school or ride a bike.
In places like this, they learn how to make fire from the land.
The elders' method of using a hand drill is what my own method was mirrored from, but notice the difference.
There's a smoothness in his skill that comes from a life of making fires this way, yet just like it was for me in arizona, the details are the same on the other side of the world.
The delicate balance must be struck if hot wood dust is to be ground out from the friction this man is giving to it.
All he has now is a pile of smoldering dust, and the secret here is to remember that you don't yet have a fire.
The job is not done until you can walk away and get larger pieces of wood to add to the flames.
I would guess that the first fires were simply collected after lightning strikes.
The hand drill is when we took charge of fire and made it work for us.
We were, I am sure, too impatient to wait for lightning.
Whoever first figured this method out held the secret to fire, and from there, we became a civilized species.
That's the way I do it, too.
Yeah.
It's funny how fire-starting methods around the world seem to have evolved in the same manner.
Thousands and thousands of kilometers apart, yet still, pretty much, tribes everywhere learn to start fire the very same way -- they're rubbing some sticks together.
The hand drill, to me, is such a beautiful and organic way to get a fire going, but up next, fire starting isn't always pretty.
If you look around you in a survival situation, you'll quickly learn that just about anything can be used to ignite a fire.
There's matches inside, so that's not a problem.
But still, just to conserve, and some of this old duct tape, I'm gonna use that to light the fire.
Combine modern technology with wood, and you have yourself a quick survival fire.
One thing about duct tape, it's good fire starter.
The number-four method in fire starting for survival -- using man-made tinders.
Potassium permanganate, an antiseptic.
Glycerin for diarrhea.
Watch what happens when you put them both together.
The chemical makeup of everything from duct tape to liquid soap can be highly flammable.
That's what happens when you put the two of them together.
There we go.
Now I'm gonna put these corn chips in, believe it or not.
All that effort and a couple of corn chips was worth it.
Duct tape, glycerin, and corn chips were not meant to make fire, but they sure work.
I'll show you what I mean about those corn chips.
Look.
See that? And it holds its flame just like a little tiny candle.
So, if you don't have much tinder and you happen to have some corn chips in your pocket like I did, then it's a great way to help get your fire going.
I like to go into the stores and grab those last-minute survival items.
You know, it just says "general survival" aisle.
And just to test them out.
So, I grabbed some stuff that is some kind of -- well, they call it fire dust.
We'll see what that's like.
To go with it, I've got one match.
The secret to using store-bought emergency fire-starting tinder is actually knowing the down side, and that is that for most of them, you still need a flame to begin with.
They won't ignite on just a spark.
That said, once you can light them with a flame, they maintain it long enough to build up your fire and help to keep it going.
All right.
So far so good with this dust.
And that's what I like to see.
We have fire, folks.
Using chemicals intended for fire starting bought from the camping store or just figuring out what materials around you contain flammable chemicals can save you a lot of effort searching in the forest for tinders.
Some simple hand sanitizer and a spark.
And we've got fire.
Petroleum jelly.
And mixed in with the cotton.
Take a flint sparker here.
See that? Cotton takes the flame real well and holds it.
Birch bark comes in.
And I've got myself a very fast fire.
So, I've got a piece of this cotton, and there was some toilet paper, but the way I'm gonna make them last is I've got some lip balm.
So, I'm gonna utilize this wax In both places -- I'm gonna put it on the cotton from the first-aid kit and on the toilet paper.
And that should really hold the flame.
The one-match fire you do not want to miss.
It's got to take.
Whether toilet paper, cotton balls, or the ends of q-tips, cotton and wax combined is often my go-to fire starter.
Success.
Let's find out if this works.
If it does, I can heat up some water.
On this occasion in norway, I tried some chemical pellets meant for survival.
The fumes were toxic and horrible, but the heat and speed of the fire was undeniably advantageous.
Even this little flame, as chemical as it is, feels great.
I like this little survival stove.
It's getting a thumbs up in my book, I think.
Whereas the hand drill requires a great deal of skill, and using chemical fire starters means you needed to have brought them in with you, these next two methods quickly became favorites of mine because they connected me emotionally and physically to the mountain men of old.
A spark.
Sometimes all you have is a spark.
But if you have something to catch that spark, you can make a quick fire and continue to survive.
Pioneers had rock and steel, but we bettered that with the addition of magnesium.
The number-three method in fire starting for survival -- flint strikers and rock and steel.
Every time I come out and try survival in a new location, I like to test some kind of survival item just to see how it works.
This time around, I'm gonna try this little item -- magnesium flint stick.
What I want to do is shave off this magnesium.
I need to make a little pile.
Got to be real patient.
Drop a lighter or a pack of matches in the water and you're out of luck.
Drop this striker in the water, and with a wipe of your shirt, it'll still work just as well.
Well, that's not a bad pile.
We'll see.
I just don't know.
Magnesium.
Some flint strikers come only with the sparker, no magnesium.
There we go.
There we go.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Burn, baby, burn.
The secret to this kind of striker with the magnesium bar attached is that you don't need to find any tinder to catch the spark.
That little magnesium stick is definitely a winner in my book.
Hey.
If the sparking device doesn't have magnesium attached, that's still okay, 'cause there are often many different types of fluffy tinders around like cattails or milkweed.
But if you're carrying bullets, as most hunters would, then your gunpowder will take a spark quite nicely.
And by the way, more hunters are caught in survival situations every year than all the other types of wilderness travelers combined.
Shotgun shell.
Basic striker here.
Beautiful, strong spark.
Got gunpowder from the shell.
Let's give it a shot here.
Here we go.
There we go.
There we go! Hey! Bingo! The thing about getting a fire going, you've really got to seek out dry tinder, dry brush and twigs, and you can find it.
Even if it's been raining all week, you can find it underneath logs, underneath rock overhangs, and take your time.
If you take a long time to get all of this dry tinder, you will get a fire going.
This time, I'm gonna use, basically, the traditional pioneer method.
They didn't have their packs of matches or lighters to carry around.
What they did have was steel -- something with a high carbon element -- and rock, and let's not get into what different kinds of rocks you can spark with.
If you're lost, just find a rock that'll spark if you happen to be lucky enough to have some steel with a high carbon element in it.
Ow.
Haven't done this in a while.
Last thing you need is a way.
What's happening here is you're coming down and shaving off tiny little slivers of metal, and they're shooting away melting -- melted -- and they need something to land on.
So what you need is something to catch that little spark and then hold a glow.
So, you try to get the spark to land on it.
Just like the wood you might use in fire by friction, even the humidity in the air can affect how well this charred cloth will take a spark, and in this clip, I'm in far northern ontario, and the nighttime temperatures are dipping 40 degrees below zero.
Not a good start.
So this fire was vital to my survival.
The cloth is 100% cotton that's been put inside a closed metal can and charred through.
Any natural fiber can work, but my secret is using blue-jeans cotton.
Oh, boy.
Lots of good sparks, but the cloth isn't holding it.
That's not a good sign.
Remember "jeremiah johnson"? Robert redford sat there in the bush trying to get a fire going.
This is exactly the method he was using.
Another secret to this is the feel.
A smooth striking method will be far more effective than hard hitting.
Got her.
All right.
What I've got now is this piece of charred cloth is just holding a little ember -- a little glow.
I think you might be able to see that.
That gives me some time to put it in my tinder bundle, which is this collection of dried grass and spanish moss, cedar bark that's been all schmucked up there and sort of broken up and that.
And try to make yourself a little furnace here.
Keeping any breeze at my back and my hands underneath the heat, I blow up and into the bundle.
Whoo.
Close.
Make sure you got all your other tinder ready, and of course, birch bark is a perfect tinder -- full of oils.
Even when it's soaking wet, it'll burn well.
Oh.
And you're in business.
"Now, why should you bother carrying a piece of rock and steel," you might ask? If you found a way to get a spark like that, you can extend the life of your lighter and your matches and not even have to use them, and that may matter a great deal if all you have is a handful of three or four matches on your person.
Hand drills and steel strikers are somewhat romantic methods for fire starting, and man-made emergency tinder is a very effective improvement, but up next, anything goes.
Over the years, getting a fire going in a survival situation, whether it's raining or dry, hot or cold, became somewhat of a personal challenge for me.
There were a lot of times that I would head out, and I would know what I was going to do.
I knew I was going to do a fire bow or a hand drill because I was in a certain situation.
But there are a lot of other times where I just took it as it came at me.
I had no idea how I was gonna get my fire going or how I was gonna make use of whatever was available to me.
The number-two method in fire starting for survival -- anything goes.
I have started fires by hitting rock and steel together Oh, that's beautiful.
spinning a piece of wood with my hand Gasoline and a spark I don't like playing with gasoline.
Okay.
Yeah.
Hey! Whoo! batteries A little 12-volt battery.
Steel wool.
Touch it to this terminal here.
Oh.
flashlight.
What I need to do is break the bulb without breaking the filament inside the bulb.
There's the bulb in there.
All I got to do is turn it on.
Yeah.
Even started a fire using chocolate and a can.
Just a little bit of chocolate.
And apparently, I can take the chocolate, polish up -- with the wax that's in the chocolate -- polish up the bottom of this can.
The idea is the concave nature of the bottom of the can should focus a beam of sunlight into the tinder and start it up just like you would use a magnifying glass.
Hard to do.
There's light there, and it's just coming back onto the grass right there.
For years, people have been sending me their ideas on survival, and fire starting is always at the top of the list.
Amazing.
Absolutely amazing.
I really didn't think I had a hope in anywhere of getting a fire going with a piece of chocolate, some sand, and the bottom of a pop can.
You can make a fire with that lighter without fluid.
First I'm gonna sacrifice one of these pieces of tissue.
And what I want to do is just first just take it and roll it up.
Need a little bit of a sort of funnel -- funnel-like opening.
The next thing that I want to do is turn to my socks here and pull off a good wad of sock lint.
Just try to get, oh, I don't know, maybe a dime-sized amount of lint.
Just put the fluff in this top end of the tissue paper, and we have the makings of what I'm going to call a prison match.
This is how people often get a fire going even just to light their cigarettes in prison when they ran out of fluid, since lighters are at a premium there.
Don't ask me how I know that.
No flame.
Success.
Right off the bat.
The first one, too.
Nice.
Nice.
Nice.
Yeah.
See if I can get a fire going.
Gonna harvest the power from the batteries -- three double as -- to see if I can make fire.
That's where the bulb would go.
And I'm gonna just take the wires right off of this piece here.
Theoretically, I should be able to attach those two wires and perhaps create a hot enough bit of wire to make fire with some cotton.
So, we're gonna give this a shot.
One piece of cotton batting down on the pile.
Here comes a lucky battery.
Not sure if that's gonna work or not.
That's really hot.
Got me some smoke.
And let that sit.
It's very hot.
But I can't believe it works.
An l.
E.
D.
Flashlight, taking the back off, attaching the wires to each other, and then simply turning it on, and it was hot enough to get that cotton batting to ignite.
It's fire time, and I've only got one paper match.
If I'm very, very careful, I can split it right down the center, turn it into two matches.
Okay.
Here we go.
One match has now become two.
The whole point of these crazy methods is to extend your ability to get a fire going as often as needed without using up your matches or lighter fluid.
I'm gonna try something new for getting a fire going.
I've got all the stuffing from the coconut tree.
Add a bit of gasoline.
There we go.
This is a rescue tube -- diver's rescue tube.
And usually, things kept in it are items like matches, lighters, and often, in my case anyway, I have flares.
These things tend to shoot really far.
Wish me luck, folks.
Here we go.
This is potentially a dangerous method for starting a fire, but it does illustrate just how important fire is in a survival situation.
Whatever it takes, you got to have a fire.
What happened there was there's my flare.
See, you just pull down on this lever, and boom, you shoot the flare.
And normally it goes flying up into the sky, so I just had everything closed in there with the rock up top.
Shoot that right into it.
Come on, baby, burn.
Here we go.
That's what I like to see.
And I'll bet you that would work whether there was gasoline or not, so it's a good thing to know.
Flare, big bundle of dry tinder, protect it with a rock, and you've got yourself a good fire.
So, I've got dried wood, dry grass, and little arctic flowers that have already gone to seed, so they're fluffy.
Sounds to me like the makings of a fire.
I had often heard that it was possible to remove the projectile from a bullet and fire the powder still left in the shell into dry tinder to make fire.
The original pioneers did use their flintlock rifles to start their fires, but not quite this way.
It proved to be easier said than done, and here in the high arctic, it took several tries before I finally noticed a tiny glowing bit of tinder fluff waiting to be coaxed into a flame.
Ooh.
Hang on.
Hang on.
Hang on.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Oh, man.
Hey, there we go.
100% cotton.
So, my bandana's 100% cotton.
That's a really good thing 'cause I'm gonna make use of it.
Just use enough so I can still wear it.
What I want to do is I want to rough it up, break up the fibers so that it's somehow kind of fluffy.
I've looked around the desert here, and I'm just not seeing anything fluffy.
Lots of pointy and prickly and stabby things, but nothing fluffy.
There we go.
Just breaking up these fibers nicely so I can pull them apart with my fingers.
I'll start off with this small piece -- see if I can do it.
Hopefully, that'll do the trick.
Let's keep all this small stuff right there ready.
Shove the cigar in.
Blow.
And I think the beauty of this is I might be able to actually blow from the end of the cigar -- from the non-lit end -- to make this work.
Hmm.
This is gonna be tricky.
Here in mexico, it turned out that the only piece of non-synthetic material I had was my bandana, but it was worth the sacrifice.
And that's the secret about anything goes being ready to sacrifice something to make fire.
I got fire.
Up next is my number-one method, and it wasn't easy deciding.
I had to go with a way that I myself could pull off fairly easily and a way that didn't require having anything more than what the surrounding landscape provided, and the bonus to my chosen method is that the act of doing it alone would always warm me up, even before I got the flames of fire.
And the number-one method in fire starting for survival -- my personal favorite -- the fire bow.
In the year 2001, though I'd been successful with a fire bow 1,000 times before, it was here in northern ontario where, for the first time, getting this fire going really mattered to my survival.
You know what? I'm getting smoke, but my notch is not close enough to the hole.
The dust is just scattering around.
The temperatures had soared during a record-breaking heat wave, and I'd been dropped off alone for the first time ever to film myself surviving.
I was nervous on all levels, and nothing was working.
Even my bootlaces on the bow were not performing as usual.
Aw.
My bootlace is broken.
I've doubled the bootlace to hopefully make it stronger.
Boy, this is one of the toughest I've ever had to do.
And you know, I've done hundreds of these fires.
But this setup is not optimum.
It's not working for me for some reason.
The bugs were bad and there was not much to eat, but still, I had to get fire.
This area was prone to big storms, and it wouldn't be long before another one came in on me.
The days were long, so I had plenty of daylight, but time was still running away, and many hours passed working hard at it under the scorching sun.
Oh, god.
So close.
With cedar from trees close to the shore of the lake as my bottom baseboard piece, I used poplar wood for the spindle.
I started using my bootlaces for the bow, but they kept breaking on me as I continued trying different combinations of wood.
And every time I stopped, I focused my eyes on the dust I'd created, hoping to see a little wisp of smoke, but nothing.
If I don't get it this time, I got to take a break.
String broke.
Down to one string.
You can see here, out of desperation, that I move my right hand up and how tightly I'm holding the bow.
I'm moving my hand up the bow to keep the string from loosening and it's not working.
After five hours of attempts, I'd broken all my bootlaces and I had to start all over.
This time, I'd cut off the bottom end of my shirt and twisted it together into a string I could use on the bow.
Piece on the top that I used to push it all down is called the bearing block.
In this case, it was just any piece of wood that would fit in my palm nicely.
Oh, man.
By the time I had finally got the dust hot enough to ignite, I'd spent nearly 11 hours on it.
It's very important here that I don't jump up 'cause I could kick everything flying.
It's very tender.
Okay.
All right.
I got to be really gentle.
11 hours of effort and 7 days of survival were riding on this tiny and fragile little ember formed from the hot wood dust.
Not a very optimistic beginning, I know, but over the next 10 years, I'd have a chance to attempt it again and again in places like mexico, costa rica, and northern ontario.
I've never had so much trouble getting a fire going.
Oh, yeah.
Whoo! Got my fire bow, which is just a bow and this bootlace.
And a spindle -- straight and dead and dry -- and then to push it all down, I've got this bearing block.
I can put the spindle right up in here, and I think I'll be able to hold it down.
It'll be my bearing block, basically.
Put a little hole in here to start off.
Can see the edge out there.
And hopefully, that little notch there will give it a place -- all the ash -- a place to fall.
Let's give this a shot.
Wish me luck.
I've always preferred to go barefoot, even in the snow, when I attempt the fire bow.
I find that I get a good feel for the baseboard underneath my foot and that I can manipulate it and move it around a little if I need to.
I always found that keeping my big hiking boots on added the risk of knocking the setup flying when I lift my foot off, and thereby destroying the little ember I was creating in the first place.
And I come off it real careful.
Here we go.
Transfer.
When I first began filming survival, it took me over 11 hours to create fire using the fire bow.
I was now able to make it all happen in just a few minutes.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
There we go.
Whoo! Touch and go.
Whoo! Yeah.
That is sweet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's how it's done.
Having a fire changes almost everything in a survival situation.
It creates psychological comfort, cooks your food, keeps you warm, keeps away predators, signals rescuers, boils water, making it safe to drink.
It can even be used to make tools, so it follows that one of the most important survival skills you can have is the ability to create fire.
But not only create it, move it, manipulate it, contain it, and maintain it over a long period of time.
These were my top five methods, but truth be told, I'd rather head out into the wilderness with a lighter and a box of matches any day.