Lightwood: Nature's Own Fire Starter

Image Gallery The author warms himself by a fire ignited with pitch in Montana's Bitterroot Mountains.

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Here's the pitch: No more crumpling up a mountain of newspaper to fire up the woodstove, and no more wasting valuable Coleman fuel to coax a reluctant campfire into comforting flames.

All the experienced woodsmen I knew while I was growing up in Montana and Idaho started their campfires with pitch —a sticky, resinous substance found in and on conifer trees. Those old-timers knew that this naturally occurring incendiary is not only totally dependable, but also available anyplace evergreen trees are found.

Pitch is formed by the concentration of resins in a conifer's heartwood and roots, as well as on the bark, especially around scars and near the base of the trunk. Wood that's impregnated with pitch is interchangeably called lightwood or pitch wood.

In some cases, a tree will produce so much resin that the sappy substance actually exudes from the wood in the form of highly flammable, yellowish globs—known as pitch balls t hat cling to the bark. Pitch balls as big as a prizefighter's fists can sometimes be found near the bases of young pine trees, while in spruce and fir forests pitch balls rarely exceed the size of peas.

In fact, the pines produce more pitch than any other species of conifer, and of the pines, the most resinous variety is the eastern North American Pinus rigida, commonly called the pitch pine. But pitch is most common in the vast western evergreen forests.

Although pitch resins are most abundant in the pines, Douglas fir produces the richest (that is, the most flammable) pitch. But because it congeals only in the heartwood, fir pitch is more difficult to locate and harvest than pine pitch; about the only way to find Douglas fir pitch is to chop the heartwood out of rotted stumps or logs.

With pine, however, harvesting pitch can be as simple as breaking off chunks of bark near a tree's base. The dried resin will be visible on the bark as hardened, yellowish globs. But be careful to remove only small amounts of the outer bark from any one tree to avoid damaging the pine's health—and you might want to wear gloves to keep the sticky stuff off your hands.

One of the best and most accessible sources of large quantities of pitch wood is driftwood washed down from high mountain forests during the annual springtime flooding of western rivers. In many cases, huge jams of evergreen logs collect along the insides of a river's bends or get tangled in snag piles. Later in the year, when the floodwaters recede, these logjams are left high and dry, providing the knowledgeable camper or firewood gatherer with veritable mountains of pitch-rich wood.

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