Making a tinder bundle

Dried grasses work well and can be found almost everywhere but lack any accelerants. Most resins, or sap, will act as accelerants within the tinder bundle. Evergreen trees are full of resins to help ignite the spark, or coal, into a flame.

Cedar is by far my favorite material for making tinder bundles, or nest. Cedar’s can be found all over and are easily identifiable. It’s the bark of the cedar that makes the tinder, not the foliage. If you gently scrape across the bark with your fingernails or a knife, you can remove the loose, peeling, dry bark off without harming the tree. Once you’ve got a fist full then you will need to work the material into that bird’s nest shape. To “work” the material, simply ball the bark up in your hands and pull it apart, ripping and shredding it a bit in the process. Be careful not to overdo this and turn your tinder into dust.

Tinder is an easily combustible material used to ignite fires by rudimentary methods. Basically, tinder is the