The Many “Right” Ways to Start a Fire
August 2026 · Fire-Starting · PaleoHikerMD · Winterdance
It’s all easy in good conditions (in the West Elk Mountains of Colorado).
How hard can it be to start a fire? Well, when it’s pouring rain or dumping down snow, it gets much harder. It never helps that you might be exhausted, cold and impatient. So it’s worth putting together the things you need for a worst-case scenario, and getting some practice with methods that are super-reliable.
First step: load the stove. You are looking for very dry tinder - grasses, small twigs, the dead parts of shrubs. The ground is usually the wettest place around, even in deserts, so look for fuel that is anywhere from knee height up to over your head. Look under trees, rocks and in other protected places. And while you’re at it, collect a double handful of bigger pieces that you’ll use once you get the fire going.
Load the Ganesha stove with the smallest, driest fuel you’ve got. (Pro tip: corn chips and potato chips burn really well. It’s better to eat them, but do what you need to do.)
Lighting the fire: my favorite method
Have you ever heard of a ferro rod? I hadn’t, either. It’s a miraculous stick of magnesium, and comes with a steel striker. You scrape the striker along the rod, and hot sparks fly off. Not just hot: 4500 degrees F. It works just as well when it’s soaking wet, lasts for several thousand uses, and costs about $15. Here’s a link to the best one.
Suprisingly, you can take a ferro rod through TSA checkpoints, in your carry-on luggage.
So, OK, sparks. It’s a challenge to start a fire with sparks. So I pack some cotton balls rolled in Vaseline. Stretch out the cotton ball to give that spark lots of surface area to hit. I put the cotton in the stove, under the tinder but with plenty still sticking out the front. One or two strikes with the ferro rod and boom, fire. (The cotton balls don’t work quite as well when they are wet, so I keep them in a Ziploc). If you run out of cotton balls, a bundle of dry grass works too.
Starting a fire with a ferro rod on a cold and rainy day.
Other ways to start a fire:
Use a lighter or matches. Rain and snow are not your friends with these methods. Waterproof matches do work when it’s wet out, but they can be frustrating.
Fun, but not recommended: a magnifying glass or lens (you can even use a plastic bag filled with water). You’ll need to do it in the middle of the day, with a clear sky and full sun. Or, for the truly dedicated, you can make your own bow drill or one of its variants. I have done this, and it’s very rewarding, but it takes a lot of time and effort to get it right.
Influencer Spotlight: Ernie Garcia aka PaleoHikerMD
Ernie lives in the steamy bayous of Louisiana, and had to wait until the weather was cool enough to try out the Ganesha stove. He is an avid twig stove aficionado, and has tested literally hundreds of stoves. He puts the work into it, and provides detailed, nuanced reviews. He was very impressed by the Ganesha, both its low weight and performance. You can watch his review on YouTube here.
“Crazy lightweight. It fold flats yet it has that gasifier effect”
- PaleoHikerMD
Ernie takes everything seriously.
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Thanks to subscriber Ralph Neelands for this month’s photo.
“Quetico Provincial Park, in northwestern Ontario, Canada. September 2025. Russell Lake. My pot was too large to fit inside, but two titanium tent stakes set across the top easily solved that problem.”
What to Read
Winterdance, the Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod, by Gary Paulsen. Known for incredible young-adult books like Hatchet, Paulsen decides one day that he wants to run the Iditarod. He knows nothing, has no dogs, has never seen the race. But that doesn’t stop him, and it’s an incredible (and very funny) story.
A long but revealing quote from the book:
“Do you like the race so far?’
I looked at her, trying to find sarcasm, but she was serious; she really wanted to know. And I thought of how to answer her.
I had gotten lost, been run over by a moose, watched a dog get killed, seen a man cry, dragged over a third of the teams off on the wrong trail, and been absolutely hammered by beauty while all this was happening. (It was, I would find later, essentially a normal Iditarod day — perhaps a bit calmer than most.) I opened my mouth.
‘I …’
Nothing came. She patted my arm and nodded. ‘I understand. It’s so early in the race. There’ll be more later to talk about …’
And she left me before I could tell her that I thought my whole life had changed, that my basic understanding of values had changed, that I wasn’t sure if I would ever recover, that I had seen god and he was a dog-man and that nothing, ever, would be the same for me again, and it was only the first true checkpoint of the race.
I had come just one hundred miles.”
More info at ganeshastove.com. Use code DISPATCH10 for 10% off.