Advice on cutting tools/saw combination for backpacking in the Rocky Mountains

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Fuori

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Oct 13, 2014
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I always carry a SAK and a Silky in my pack and will buy a Mora Black/ESEE 4/BOB 3.5 to bring.

The thing I have trouble with is knowing what to carry to split the wood. I'm a fan of a saw vs a hatchet, so that's out. I'm also not a fan of using my primary to baton, but I could use an ESEE 6 instead of the ones above.

The Junglas has been considered for pairing with the Mora Black, but that is a lot of weight and a lot of money for a glorified froe. Redundancy is a good thing, though. An extra blade if something goes wrong isn't a bad thing. A friend offered to sell me an SP8, so that could work as well. This trip won't be in the winter, but I'd like to have something that would work in the late fall when I could run into snow. I saw some YouTube videos of a guy using the Junglas in Rockies in those conditions with good success.

Thank you in advance for the help!
 
lawp said:
Because of fire restrictions you will not find many, if any, locations where you can have a campfire in the Rockies. Backpackers carry a backpacking stove for cooking. I've used hardly more than a Swiss Army Knife for 50 years in the Rockies.
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Fires or Stoves: Leave No Trace campers always carry a stove and know when to use it. Lightweight stoves don't leave black scars or otherwise damage the land, and are more reliable than fires for cooking. If you must have a fire, use a properly located existing fire site and burn only dead wood from the forest floor. Never cut down trees or branches from live trees; it is illegal. Avoid building fires at high elevations where growing seasons are short and wood is scarce. Never put foil, can, bottles, or plastic in your fire and always drench it with water when you are finished. Some areas are closed to fires.
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That is on the FS site. There are quite a few locations near me that allow that unless other restrictions are in place.
 
Fuori said:
I always carry a SAK and a Silky in my pack

The thing I have trouble with is knowing what to carry to split the wood.
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The saw can be used to split wood with.


You can also use the knife to make a few wooden wedges for splitting.
 
What sort of dry timber will be in your area to split? if you have dry birch, you might get away with one of the light weight plastic wedges (but not for long) or a hatchet head only could do, but there is not a lot of places with birch/poplar from memory. I wouldn't want to split a lot of undried or semi-dried pine, so as long as you choose your sizes carefully you should be able to get the larger stuff burning by just having a lot of twig-thumb thick stuff. Are you weight limiting due to being on foot, or just for skills?
 
gadgetgeek said:
What sort of dry timber will be in your area to split? if you have dry birch, you might get away with one of the light weight plastic wedges (but not for long) or a hatchet head only could do, but there is not a lot of places with birch/poplar from memory. I wouldn't want to split a lot of undried or semi-dried pine, so as long as you choose your sizes carefully you should be able to get the larger stuff burning by just having a lot of twig-thumb thick stuff. Are you weight limiting due to being on foot, or just for skills?
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There are so many kinds I'm not sure. Pines, aspens, and oaks.
 
Dry pine, you'd likely need a really solid splitter for anything past 3 inch (I'm guessing here, I'm well out of practice) medium sized aspen/poplar species (apart from black poplar) can be split sometimes, but they are highly variable, and unless dry (or frozen) can be really tough. As for oak, I wouldn't even plan on splitting it, just scuffing chunks off with a hatchet. Aspen may be clean enough for random baton smashing, but depends a lot on the timber condition. As I said, plan on burning small stuff if you want to carry the minimums, but overall an extra big chopper isn't a better choice than a good hatchet for those trees. They burn well enough, so as long as you plan well it will go fine. On that line as long as you are thinking about it an ESEE-4 is going to do fine (or something in that size range) as long as you are not bashing it through majorly twisted stuff.
As for people using big choppers as splitting wedges, that's them, whatever. Does it work for anything else you will need, does the length get you anything? For me, I can't see that extra mass being any advantage. If something is within your price range, buy it, learn, sell it on and consider the difference the price of the education.
 
Friendly advice- lots of time spent in the woods has shown me that 3-4” diameter logs is the best bang for energy spent. If you’re really backpacking in a place that allows fires, I wouldn’t bother with more than a SAK, a mora companion and a silky saw. The need to split wood is greatly exaggerated. If you had to, the humble companion can split wood just fine.
 
If you really feel a need for a batonning/splitting tool and a hatchet is out, consider something like a CS True Flight. Yes, it is made as a throwing knife but it is also a solid slab of 1050 that will split 3-4” rounds all day long. Also functions as a back up knife if needed. Low cost, relatively low weight, compact, multi-purpose. Checks a lot of boxes.
 
Guy McVer said:
You can also use the knife to make a few wooden wedges for splitting.
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Simple concept, but here's a video on that too:


Regardless of how you personally feel on the subject, it's at least true that you don't need to baton with your knife to split wood.

If you have longer pieces then you can use the method from the video I posted above to split them with your saw.
 
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