Finding Lighter'd (Fatwood)

We always kept a good supply of lighter’d when I was a kid growing up on the farm. Lighter’d. That’s what we knew it as. Most of it was stumps that we would dig out and drag home with the tractor. Some of it was fence posts that had finally grown too short to be of fence use any more. I do not recall a time that we didn’t have a pile of this Gold Standard for Firemaking stacked up.

It’s one of those things that a person kind of takes for granted when they are surrounded by an abundance of it.

I was at first surprised, when I stumbled across YouTube and the bushcraft groups on Facebook a few years ago, that there are people unfamiliar with this resource. After thinking about it a little, the surprise wore off. Not all people grow up playing in the woods. The woods, for a lot of people, is an entirely new territory.

I had a little chore that needed to be done in the woods this afternoon so I figured I would combine tending to that chore with doing a bit of lighter’d exploration and do a picture chronicle of the findings. The following photos in this blog are the result of that exploration … one that involved a combined distance of maybe 250 yards and less than an hour of interesting fun poking around in the woods.

An entire stump is always a great find!

This is the leftover from when the tree was cut for timber. I don’t know how long ago that was. It took a good long time though for the stump to decay and the resin … what we always called rozzin … to concentrate.

  

Fallen trees that are decaying away are a good source to check for lighter’d.

Knock away the rot and look inside.

One thing to remember is that all pines are not created equal in the rozzin department. This is especially true with the faster growing varieties that have been developed by the timber industry. They still contain resin but not nearly the resin content of the old varieties that were here before the first manual powered felling saws went into the woods.

Even the less resinous trees still produce lighter’d.

Look for the knots … where branches were once attached to the tree.

Here is another example of lighter’d that is waiting to be added to the supplies.

The entire length is good lighter’d. The fattest lighter’d will be close to the trunk.

Yet another hunk of lighter’d waiting to be toted home.

Note the deep reddish color. The fatter the wood the richer the color.

It’s a thin slab of lighter’d … at most a half inch thick.

I broke off a piece to show the rich fat content.

This is a great find.

Injured pine trees weep resin to cover the wound.

Fresh resin has a number of uses but covering those uses needs its own space.

Another thing to remember about lighter’d is that a little goes a long way. There are many fires in a small stick of it. A small pile of dust scraped from a stick of lighter’d with the spine of your knife, and a few small shavings whittled off that stick, is more than enough to supply the fire necessary to ignite a properly constructed fire lay.

Yet another is that … provided you have a good supply of it … a nice sized hunk of it will supply enough heat to dry out wet tinder and carefully selected fuel wood on a bad rainy day.

We get a lot of rain. It’s a good thing lighter’d is in abundant supply.