Spend a weekend camping and your hands will invariably show it. There is no escaping the dirt, ash, pine tar and other unmentionable funk that can accumulate on the surface of the skin from the variety of tasks the hands perform while in the field. But where is the soap when you need it? Depending upon where you live there should be at least one plant variety in your area that contains enough saponin to be used as a soap substitute. In the book How to Survive Anywhere, Christopher Nyerges describes several options that are available for personal hygiene for those spending lots of time in the woods. One of the plants that Christopher discusses in detail is Yucca. Now, where I live in the northeast, yucca is definitely not a naturally occurring plant. It is typically associated with the desert southwest. However, it is widely planted as an ornamental landscape species and can be found in many places throughout. So, I happened to have access to some yucca from which I picked a couple of leaves and then processed them as outlined by Christopher. As he explains, just separate the fibers from an individual leaf into several smaller strands, add water to the bundle and agitate between your palms to build up a lather, then rinse. The lather that is generated, in combination with the semi-abrasive quality of the leaf fibers, should leave your hands squeaky clean. And as you can see in the accompanying photo, the lather is an interesting shade of chlorophyl-green, so now washing can be fun AND hygienic at the same time.

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Here I go, playing with fire again!  This is something I saw Ray Mears demonstrate in his Bushcraft video series.  It is a neat concept that requires a dry and seasoned log.  In the Bushcraft episode, Ray uses pine.  I didn’t have pine available but I did have some knotty spruce from a tree that was felled from the yard this spring.  It wasn’t as seasoned as well as it should have been, making it more difficult to ignite, but once it got started it burned nicely.  I used a chainsaw to make the cuts.  In the video, Ray explained that the cuts could also be made with a hand saw or the log could be split into quarters and the ends buried in the ground vertically.  The splitting method seems easiest of the two alternatives and when I do this again, I’ll try it that way for comparison.  One mistake I made was packing the cuts way too tightly with sticks which impeded the oxygen flow thus adding further difficulty to the ignition process.  As you can see by the photos, the wind was wreaking havoc on the distribution of heat and flame.  Even with the wind conditions as they were, I was able to get the uncovered pot to a boil, but not to a rapid, rolling boil.  I suspect that under more ideal circumstances (i.e., no wind, properly seasoned wood, and perhaps a lid for the pot) the water would have reached a rolling boil.  We’ll have to see what happens the next time I try the Fire Log out.

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Today I finished up a Susquehanna point that I had originally worked into a little biface a few days ago.  The material is keokuk chert and probably wasn’t historically used with this eastern style of point.  But once it’s hafted to a spear or atlatl dart, I doubt any critter that might be on the receiving end would know the difference.

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Playing with fire is always fun.  Today I experimented with torches.  I wanted to try out different fuel types and ended up using pine pitch and tallow.  I had a bunch of pitch left over from previous projects.  I also got a bunch of fat that I rendered into tallow from the woodchuck I “sampled” a few weeks ago and used for torch fuel.  For the torches, I used the seed head from the cattail stalk and the same with common mullein stalks.  I made 4 torches total: 2 cattail torches – 1 with tallow and 1 with pitch, and 2 mullein torches – also with pine and tallow.

The tallow, when warmed, easily absorbed into the cattail fluff and I assumed that the cattail would act like a wick in a candle and burn.  Boy, was I disppointed.  I couldn’t get the cattail with either fuel type to light easily and when they did, they immediately went out when removed from the heat.  The mullein, on the other hand, worked well.  But, again, I was disappointed, this time with the quality of burn.  Both mullein stalks (with tallow and pine pitch) burned, but not like I am used to seeing on TV – with a large flame throwing out loads of light.  They burned more like over-sized candles.  Both fuel types had a tendency to drip (pine) or run (tallow) down the stalks while burning.  And both burned down in about 20 minutes.  Not too bad a burn time, I’d say.  Lastly, the tallow torch didn’t smell all that great and lingered on the clothes.  The pine pitch, on the other hand, had a nice piney smell to it.

So, in closing, I wouldn’t want to use either of these by holding in my bare hand and walking through the woods.  But they could be practically used around camp to supplement the light from the campfire if poked into the ground in a convenient location.  Still, I’d like to experiment some more with different torch methods and compare the results.

What kind of results have you had with torches?  Please share your experiences.

UPDATE: During my first attempt with torches, I used common cattail (Typha latifolia) and I couldn’t get that to light.  Today, however, I did have some success using narrow-leaved cattail (T. angustifolia).  I soaked seed head in warm tallow and it burned for about 15 minutes or so.  I don’t know what the difference was, perhaps the smaller size of the heads, but it seems that the narrow-leaved cattail will work for a torch/candle.

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Hemp Hill (top) & Corner Notch

There is nothing worse than putting a lot of time and energy into a point only to mess things up at the very end.  I was putting in the last notch when my cone flake took out the ear.  I was hoping to make something resembling a Hemp Hill.  The finished product is still acceptable and functional but the lack of symmetry obviously reduces some of the aesthetic qualities.  The second projectile is a simple corner-notched point.  And sticking with the “I hate notching” theme, I had to punch in one of the notches with indirect percussion because I had a hard time driving through the limestone inclusions using  pressure alone.  I don’t usually like to use indirect, but in this case it seemed to work out OK.

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