Can You Start a Fire with a Sandwich Bag? (Cool Survival Hack)

Hey guys I brought you back out to the mountains today. Because I want to show you another cool way. You can start a survival fire using a sandwich baggy. Now over the years I’ve shown you how you can use water to start a fire using things like bottles, lightbulbs, saran wrap and even your pee. But I wanted to focus on using a snack bag today because there’s a good chance you’ll have one of these if you ever get lost while you’re camping or hiking.

Now perhaps one of the most important things in starting a fire is your tinder. The type of tinder that you use. We want to find something extremely dry and I’m gonna be using some bark, I’m gonna crush this up into a powder. Cause contrary to my other videos would have you believe using paper to light a fire’s not very easy. What we’re gonna do is use these big rocks and smash that up into a little powder. Because the finer we can get this the easier it will light off with the rays of the sun.

So after crushing this bark between rocks for a couple minutes. You can see it’s been reduced to a really fine dust like a really fine saw dust. And the darker the wood color the better because it’s gonna absorb more heat and now that we’ve got this stuff we can move onto our final few preparations before we actually light it up. A nice flat piece of bark like this would be good for a base plate.

Then once we’ve got that in place we can just transfer the dust over into it and form a little pile and it’s a good idea to have a backup because as the embers and coals start building you’re gonna want to have some extra dust to sprinkle on there and build it up a little quicker.

Now I got my little buddy out here helping me today. He’s going to be gathering some of the twigs that we’re going to use for our kindling. You can see that the ground is covered with all kinds of little twigs and we want the thinnest ones possible because that’s what we’re gonna transfer our embers to once we get a flame going. Trees are a great resource for kindling as well as they’ve got these old, dead branches that are super thin, super fine. Within a matter of seconds you can get a whole handful of tinder that. I’ll just be great for when a flame starts growing. Now the last thing that’s going to be really helpful in building a tinder bundle is some kind of dead grass like this yellowish stuff down there. If you dig down underneath and pull it out you can get enough of it to fold it over and build a nest and our little sticks and twigs should nestle down nicely right inside of that. Alright guys, so I’ve been scavenging in the forest for all the different materials that we’ll need then we got them laid out here in order. I’ll be starting with this little tinder pile here. Once we ignite that with the sunlight I’ve got a little bit coarser bark that I’ve ground up that we’ll sprinkle over the top.

Once that’s smoking pretty good we’ve got some dead grass that I can form into a little nest or tinder bundle and once that catches fire, we’ve got little tiny twigs that’ll help sustain that flame and then hopefully that’ll be enough to catch these on fire. Once there’s enough heat to ignite these things our fire should be pretty well self-sufficient at that point. Now the trick to using a sandwich bag or a snack bag to starting a fire is first you gotta make sure it’s empty then you gotta fill it up with water. Now you’re gonna want to fill your bag up about half full of water and you can use water from a creek like I’m doing here or water from your bottle or in extreme emergencies you can even use your urine. The first thing you’re gonna want to do is tilt your baggie to the side so it makes a diamond shape with one of the points facing down.

Then we’re gonna grab this top area here then we’ll need to twist that to trap as much of the water inside as possible. Now the more you twist your baggie the more you’re gonna notice it starts to bulge out and form these curves which starts to look like a liquid sphere and that’s exactly what we’re going for It is a very fine line though because the more you twist the closer the bag is to bursting and then you’re gonna lose it all.