If you use bark, you’re going to rub yourself raw… or leave something back there. Pine needles have oils that can irritate sensitive spots. Leaves are okay, but I couldn’t see a leaf for miles. Any hardwoods around me were bare as a fresh Brazilian bikini wax.
So I went with snow. Cold? Yes. HELL yes. But you’re numb after the first couple of passes. The trick is to pack a good, hard snowball. The worst is to have it fall apart in your hand. Super nasty. But with a snowball sculpted exactly for the process, you can scrape off the top layer against tree bark and have a clean wipe ready to go.
Bet you didn’t think you were going to learn to shit in the snowy woods, did you?
After finishing my business and walking around with a slightly chilly spring in my step, I searched the woods and finally found a fallen hardwood that looked like it had been down for a couple of years. I didn’t have an ax, so there was no way to really chop up any good pieces. I had to settle for breaking up a bunch of the smaller branches and stuffing them into my backpack. Once that was full, I found a couple of pretty big branches that were dry enough to snap by jumping on them. I dragged them, still intact, back through the woods.
Along the way, I gathered up a couple of pockets full of berries. I wasn’t dead yet, which I took as a good sign. And I hadn’t suffered any ill effects – no tripping balls and no crapping my undies – so it made sense to gather up some more and try them in greater numbers, little by little, until I could conclusively be sure they were absolutely no danger to me.
I had no idea how many calories the berries provided, but since they were starchy, it had to be something. And they would help cut the hunger when my power bars ran out, and until I was able to take down a buck or some other source of protein.
I popped another berry in my mouth and chewed as I walked. No taste, but not bad.
I finally got back ‘home.’ As I looked up at the cave, there was another thing that gave me pause: the cave was set into the side of a mountain, probably with a shit-ton of snow on top of it that I couldn’t see at the moment. And I’d had a pretty recent spate of bad luck with mountains with a shit-ton of snow on top of them.
You know – avalanches and dying and all.
But I was eventually going to die again if I didn’t get some shelter going soon. If this place could actually work out, I could make it my home base for a few days until I found something better – if there was something better to be found, that was.
But right now, I wanted to build a goddamn fire.
I tied my backpack to the end of the rappelling rope. Then I climbed up to the cave using my ice axes and hauled up the backpack.
After the wood was safely in the cave, I considered going back down and getting the branches I’d dragged over… but if I couldn’t make the fire work without smoking up the joint, there was no reason to go down and get more wood. So I decided to try to make the fire first.
I lugged the backpack to the rear of the cave, then went back and gathered up a handful of bird’s nests. They were mostly made of dead pine needles turned brown, interspersed with dead leaves. Perfect tinder.
I put down a layer of nests on the flat rocks, then created a small cone of kindling – basically smaller sticks less than one inch around – that sat over it in a teepee shape. Then I propped up the bigger logs over it all in an even bigger teepee. I wanted to get plenty of oxygen moving up through the wood to feed the fire.
Then I pulled out my waterproof package of matches. Thank God I’d brought them along. I could have started a fire by striking metal on stone, but it could have taken ten times longer.
I struck the match on the strike pad glued onto the container, then put the flame under the birds nest tinder. A couple of seconds passed, and then the dead pine needles caught fire. A few more seconds, and the tinder was really going good. I blew on it gently, and within 60 seconds the kindling was going, too.
I have never been so goddamn happy in my entire life as I was at that moment.
Well… I’ve never been so happy when I was alone. There were plenty of moments I’d had with Katie that would have surpassed making the fire.
I just wished she could have been there with me. Then it would have been perfect.
The small area began to fill up with smoke, though. To create a chimney effect and get the air moving, I took one of the pieces of burning kindling and held it right up near the crack in the ceiling. The heated air rose up through the crack, which meant that it had to be replaced with more air. At first, that was the smoky air all around me – but then fresh air from further back in the cave started to draft in.
After just a minute, the smoke from the fire began going straight up (more or less) into the crack, and fresh air got pulled into the back of the cave, which really got the fire going.
I took off my gloves and warmed my hands by the flames as I watched the logs start to catch fire. Once they were really going good, I had a regular blaze going, and I added more wood to the fire.
Time to go back down for the rest of the dead tree limbs.
I
