How important is splitting and chopping wood in a survival scenario?

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lokiman123

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By survival I don't mean making a house out of wood because you are lost in the amazon.

I understand the merits of splitting wood to get to the dryer areas of the log/wood or to get smaller pieces for kindling; but, to be honest I've started fires for many years with just breaking limbs off of trees or finding pieces of previously fallen trees. Never had to split anything and have built raging fires. If it was raining... well, I would either get extremely wet or on the rare occasion would pop a bic lighter apart with a knife and soak a small piece of fibrous material.

I'm not trying to offend anyone or start a "flame war" about fire making. Just trying to further understand the merits and as to why there is always so much talk of splitting and chopping wood.

Furthermore y is there always talk about a survival blades parameters being between high 3s to 6" or so with barely any mention in splitting ability?
 
lokiman123 said:
on the rare occasion would pop a bic lighter apart with a knife and soak a small piece of fibrous material.
Click to expand...

Please explain?

I know you are new here but this has been hashed and overhashed. Some think it is necessary some don't, more than one way to skin a cat. If you have a way that works well for you keep rockin it, just be sure to share with the rest of us. Chris
 
Depending on the climate and your location you may not have the option of just getting wet because you cannot get a fire going. Hypothermia can easliy set in if you are soaking wet and and the temperature drops.

I have split wood with everything from an axe to a spyderco pocket knife and the end result was pretty much the same. Just the time and abuse of the blade varied.

As you stated you can often get a fire going with deadfall and breaking small branches by hand. Should you find yourself in 35 degree weather and the ground soaked with a day or two of heavy rainfall this may not be the case so having a knife and the skill to safely split larger pieces of wood can come in handy in my opinion.
 
I'm guessing you don't live in a real soggy area - like the Pacific Northwest? Being able to start a fire in the coastal mountains or on the western slope of the Cascades, for at least half the year, means you have to be really good with your technique, which includes splitting wood to get dry stuff. When I lived there, is was a real challenge sometimes.

Here in southern California, it requires no technique at all to start a fire - and burn thousands of acres!
 
I would think splitting wood would be more needed for shelter and traps in a survival situation rather than for fire.

I'm not survival expert though.
 
Hmmm. Let me try;)

Why is there so much emphasis on splitting and chopping wood?

This is a knife forum and we need to find new and fun things to do with our blades????? :D

But seriously I'm coming at it from more of a "wilderness" rather than a "survival" standpoint.

Coming from that viewpoint if I comb the woods and the area I'm camping is picked clean by previous visitors and I find a dead tree say 5" in diameter and 20 feet long and I drag it back to my camping spot I can have a bigger fire faster if I chop it in peices rather than wait for it to burn in half.

90 percent of the time I've started fires same as you describe using fine spruce tips to get it started.

However maybe that other 10% it's rained a few days before and I've struggled and struggled till I split a few small branches and got enough dry stuff to where it would sustain itself and dry out the other stuff I collected on it's own.

But if I am in a wood rich environment and it's dry I just do like you say and stack it on there and let it burn in half.:thumbup:
 
"Furthermore y is there always talk about a survival blades parameters being between high 3s to 6" or so with barely any mention in splitting ability?"

sounds like you are more referring to a "bushcraft knife"-which is usually used more for fine carving than rough work.

as to the big question you asked...
it really depends on your area. i am like you and can find dead, dry wood almost all of the time, and carry things like PJCB to help get damp wood lit easily.

but as was mentioned we have some fellows in the pacific north west which is (as far as i understand) essentially a rainforest up north. this means that not only does it get cold, but it also extremely wet, most of the time. for the fellows in these areas, splitting may be the only way to get a fire going most of the time.

i don't split alot of wood while camping, but i have before. sometimes i do it just for fun, or because i'm having trouble finding wood that is in between kindling and larger logs-in other words i need to create intermediate sized wood because i can't find it.

i was once camping out for a couple of days, and it rained hard, for several hours, on friday. we were lucky to find a standing dead oak, otherwise fire would have been nearly impossible. everything was simply saturated...
 
Splitting and chopping is not a neccesary skill...unless everything is soaking wet. I live in Hawai'i's rainy forests and on numerous occasions have had trouble getting a fire started due to everything, big and small, being soaking wet. All the small kindling around you is certainly soaked to the core. The only way to find dry wood is to search underneath overhangs or logs with dryspots underneath or find the standing dead wood and split it down into quarters. It may take up to an hour to find enough wood to boil a few pots of water. The wet outer part is removed while starting the fire, but isn't neccesary once you have a decent fire going. With part of the dry core exposed the rest of the piece will catch fire after a little steaming. The dry core had be split into kindling to get a flame going. I carry a small vial with 4-5 alcohol soaked cottonballs. half a cottonball is all I've ever needed to get a fire going.

10-14" machetes are never missing from our packs...they are used dozens of times a day...from butchering pigs to clearing the impenetrable undergrowth to splitting wood to making bamboo 3prong spears for spearing the river prawns.

I have to agree with the posts above...splitting and chopping wood IS just plain fun to do when you're sitting around camp and you're bored. I usually end up carving myself a fancy handle onto the wood I use to wack the back of my machete.
 
evbouret said:
Splitting and chopping is not a neccesary skill...unless everything is soaking wet. I live in Hawai'i's rainy forests and on numerous occasions have had trouble getting a fire started due to everything, big and small, being soaking wet. All the small kindling around you is certainly soaked to the core. The only way to find dry wood is to search underneath overhangs or logs with dryspots underneath or find the standing dead wood and split it down into quarters. The wet outer part is removed while starting the fire, but isn't neccesary once you have a decent fire going. With part of the dry core exposed the rest of the piece will catch fire after a little steaming. The dry core had be split into kindling to get a flame going. I carry a small vial with 4-5 alcohol soaked cottonballs. half a cottonball is all I've ever needed to get a fire going.
Click to expand...

I would say it's a neccessary skill, maybe just not neccessary for every situation.
 
It's just another skill set that uses your knife if you have one with you. In the event that you don't have your knife, or got separated from it; one can secure a sharp edged rock and pound that into a limb end to start the split and then just tear it by hand/foot.

As far as the knife having a 3-6" blade, that is the range that most folks find they are able to use with a modicum of skill to accomplish tasks. Find a length and style of blade that you find works for you and enjoy it. Don't buy the latest greatest because you'll never stop chasing that demon....unless you're a knife collector then have at it!
 
As above, it depends on a whole bunch of things not least of which is your environment. Most of the time here I don't need to split much of anything to give the topic much brain space. Other times it can be an essential consideration. I've posted the pics below a couple of times before. Look at the juice coming from that bit of wood:

skuntillipine-b954.jpg


skuntillipine-c838.jpg


The ye olde “use standing deadwood” isn't much of a helpful suggestion either. Most of that would be soaked through completely or offer up only small useful portions. That makes fire maintenance more of a chore at least, and potentially worse. Some places have woodland like that for miles on end for much of the year.

A different reason is that with a chopping instrument and / or a saw I can be very precise about the size of the fire I want to make. There's a legion of reasons why that type of control is to be preferred.

That said, I do have some misgivings about the chopping thing. Occasionally someone will gush forth with a pronouncement that their knife or my favorite factory knife X will take on busting down a bit of wood like the above as well as an ax. There's also the an excuse to go chop something school, as if that were an end in itself, that I try to avoid too. Very little boyish.
 
In my area it's not necessary at all (canadian shield). There's always birch bark for tinder, plenty of pine/spruce needles and twigs for kindling, plenty of fallen spruce/pine to break branches off of, and once it's going good I just drag one of those fallen trees into the fire, once it's burned through the middle you can just snap it in half and feed the ends in.

Even when it's really wet out birch bark will still light and get your kindling going so it's just a matter of using more fuel at each stage.

Also, pine and spruce makes for good fuel, dead birch is like a sponge and just soaks up water and can be impossible to burn sometimes. So as you can see the ease of fire making here is really thanks to a number of environmental elements.

BaldTaco makes a good point about cutting wood into a more manageable size for a more controlled fire. Because there's virtually no duff layer to burn in the shield containing your fire is a lot easier.
 
If you split a bic lighter open in temps above freezing, you get a cloud of butane gas. Not real good if you're smoking at the time, but it would attract attention.

If, somehow, you meant a lighter that uses "lighter fluid" (naptha), you can soak wet wood with the fluid, light it, and watch it burn out with no effect on the wet wood except some steam.

Here in Ohio -- and surrounding areas, we can get rain for days at any season of the year. In dense woods, branches are often 15+ feet in the air and wood on the ground stays wet for days after the rain stops. Or it can be bone dry.
 
To me, it is a very valuable skill. It is a given that fire-making is one of the most important abilities to have in a survival situation. Being able to chop and split wood can help you to create fire (for example, by splitting large wet pieces to get at dry interiors), and to control the size of your fire. In many cases, it will make more sense to split a large log into manageable pieces rather than chucking it on the fire whole.

I was backpacking in the BC interior a few years ago, and I found a large-diameter cedar log near my campsite. I didn't want to start a bonfire - just a cooking fire for my dinner, so I used my Becker BK-9 to baton it into four smaller logs, which I kept dry under the awning of my tent during the rain. These logs, combined with kindling collected from deadwood, served me well for three days. Of course, I could have built a huge fire with the whole piece, but this would have been useful for one night only.

All the best,

- Mike
 
Here in B.C. it's coastal rainforest. If you can't split wood you are in serious trouble or have the energy to work 3 times as hard. I always have a 6 to 10 in blade and small fixed and folder. My little 4in folding saw with ferro and tindercontainer are always on my belt pouch. If I am out overnight or longer my 19 in wetterlings is standard. You would be pressed to find an experienced outdoorsman in Canada that does not pack an axe or hawk plus saw.
 
I'd wager that where I usually tromp around I could live out a few days without having to chop a single thing. But it also doesn't snow or even rain much here. Batonning apart larger pieces of wood makes things easier sometimes, but I could get by without it.
 
I don't think you can answer "how important is splitting wood in a survival scenario" by referring to general experience in the outdoors. When we go out in the woods and build shelters and light fires, that's not a survival situation. What matters on an ordinary day in the woods isn't always going to matter when your life is on the line.

How important is splitting wood in a survival situation? Depends on the situation. The difference between practice and the real thing is that in the real thing, you aren't in control. You're at the mercy of the situation.

Usually, it's not very important at all. The importance of fire, even in northern climes, is usually overstated. I can find dozens of accounts of real-life survival situations in which lighting a fire was not necessary, or was a question of greater comfort rather than staying alive.

But ... the bedrock truth of outdoor survival is that whatever you need most in any given situation will be the thing that's most difficult to attain. The time you most need a fire, a fire will be most difficult to make.

Hypothermia kills, and when you're cold and wet and the wind is howling, you can bet all the wood you can find will be cold and wet, too. Suddenly, splitting wood may move from "not really important at all" to very important. So while I may never find a need to baton with my knife in an ordinary situation (if I anticipate such a need, I'll carry an axe), I'll carry a knife that's up to the task regardless.
 
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