Paul Kirtley

If you travel in wild and remote places, you will likely end up using axes that are not your own. In my experience this most often occurs if you are staying in wilderness camps, remote cabins or huts with axes already in the woodshed, or if you have been provided with an axe as part of a larger outfitting of equipment, on a canoe trip for example. Before you start swinging an unfamiliar axe with any sort of gusto, you’ll want to make sure the axe is sound. There are some tell-tale signs to look for, indicating an axe is neglected, abused and potentially unsafe to use….

After you have felled a tree, living or dead, regardless of what the end use is, there are typically two main processing jobs you will need to complete. First, you will need to remove the tree’s limbs, that is, its branches. This is known as limbing or snedding. Second, you will need to cut the tree into sections, a task described as sectioning. Limbing and sectioning trees with an axe involve a range of axe techniques traditionally used by the woodsman, the frontiersman and for woodcraft and camping. They are very useful to have in your repertoire and in this article I look into the requisite axe techniques – and safety – in some detail…

Proficient felling of a well chosen tree, using good technique, can seem effortlessly straightforward. On the other hand, ill thought-out felling can become complicated and dangerous. Either way it is one of the more hazardous endeavours in the woods. In this article I highlight the main pointers I teach to people when learning to fell trees…

Summer or winter, being able to split small diameter wood is a useful axe skill in a fixed camp or on the trail. Split wood has many uses. From dry kindling and feathersticks to improvised grills, small-diameter rounds of dead, dry wood split down into smaller sizes are an important resource for fire lighting and fire management in particular. In this article I cover a safe, reliable and adaptable technique for year-round use…