I was on a backpacking / camping trip in the mountains last winter where it had been raining heavily and snowing nonstop for damn near a month, maybe even more. Everything was soaked through. The first couple nights I didn't even bother with a fire; it would be too much work getting it started and collecting fuel in the heavy rain, and I was already exhausted from 8 hour long days of hiking.
However, on the third day, we had hiked into a particularly nasty mountain valley. It was channeling some seriously heavy winds up through the valley directly into our camp site on the side of a northern cliff, carrying ice and rain UP the mountainside with each gust. I could also see heavy black storm clouds rolling in very quickly. We were already cold, demoralized, and wet. I wanted a fire.
The tools I had available were my RC-6 and a 15" Hacksaw. Not ideal, but it was something. I quickly found some standing dead wood that was about 8" in diameter, notched a chunk out (and quickly learned that the RC-6 does NOT chop, to my surprise), and put my saw to work. Once I had the tree down, and cut into chunks manageable enough to baton through, I thought we were set.
Boy, was I wrong. As soon as I started batoning up that first piece, I realized something. The wood was soaked right through to the middle. I've always relied on standing deadwood to be dry enough to start fires with, as this is your only chance for fire in the rainy Canadian Rockies, but today it wasn't the case. It had been raining so much for the last few weeks, that this 8-9" thick log was soaked all the way to the core. Great. And it was already dark out, with storm clouds quickly rolling in amongst the howling winds, so I couldn't try my luck downing another tree. It was either this or nothing.
So I toughed it out, spent about an hour cutting the thinnest kindling I could manage, making feather sticks, carefully propping it up on a "dry" board away from the wet ground, everything I could think of to get a fire going in these soaking wet conditions. I went into my survival kit, grabbed my petroleum jellied cotton balls, and hit them with a spark. I hoped it would be enough, as did my hiking partners who are terribly inexperienced with firemaking ("next time I'm just bringing some gasoline and styrofoam like when we go car camping!").
The fire did ignite, but it didn't grow. The fuel there just wouldn't take a flame; everything was too wet. I tried again. And again. Until I ran out of firestarters, and got sick of cutting new kindling. The storm had arrived by now, and big chunks of hail were coming down on us only to be shot back up the mountainside at us in the powerful winds. I had had enough by this point.
So do you know what I did? I built a kind of hollow box shape with my firewood, and placed my LPG camp stove underneath it, then cranked the output to full force. After about 15 minutes of being assaulted by my makeshift blowtorch, the wood was finally dry enough to burn on its own. Was that a safe thing to do? Hell no. Did it work? Hell yes. We had a giant bonfire that night, with the big tree I had cut down burning well into the morning.
Sometimes you gotta cheat to win.
