Time to catch up

October / November 2016:
My apologies to everyone who follows this blog for my tardiness in keeping it up-to-date, but I've been finding myself with little time on my hands these days. I hope to continue posting on a regular basis now that the 2016/17 trapping season is in full swing, so bear with me. Now, where to begin...

I only managed to get up to the trapline once this past summer and that was in June. I had plenty of grass to cut and some tidying up to do after squirrels had managed to get into the cabin through a hole they bored in the back wall. What a mess they made, chewing up anything and everything made of paper. I cleaned everything up and sealed the hole with some spray foam. While I was there, it started to rain and that's when I discovered the old roof shingles were going to have to be replaced, as I discovered a leak in the roof that dripped water onto my bed while I slept. A little farther over and it would have been a Chinese torture test with the water dripping right on my forehead.

The old shingles have finally given up after 32 years.

My next trip in was in late October. Good buddy Ken Marlatt joined me on this trip to help with putting on the new roof. I decided to use galvanized roofing and just screw it down right over the old shingles. If I didn't do it this way, then I would have to haul out all of the old shingles, which wasn't going to happen. We would spend two days at the cabin before heading further up north to Debolt, which is about 20 minutes out of Grande Prairie. We were joining another friend at his place to do a little elk hunting. Unfortunately, on that trip we all had cow tags but all we saw was bulls, seven of them in fact. Typical of my luck when it comes to elk hunting.

Hauling in the galvanized roofing was easy on my old quad trailer.

We managed to get the roofing on in just a few hours, about four if I remember correctly. The only real tough part was putting on the roof cap because trying to stand on the tin with the pitch of the roof was an adventure - lose your grip and you could come sliding down!

The tin roofing went on really easy. Here Ken is waiting for me to hand up another sheet.

While working on the roof cap, Ken went in bare feet so he could maintain a better grip.

Here I'm sealing the chimney with roofing tar.

And done! A cold beer on the deck sounds about right.

I had forgot to turn off the propane tank the last time I was at the cabin and it must have slowly leaked out because we had no propane left to use the stove, which meant breakfast and boiling water for coffee was going to have to take place on the outside firepit. Unfortunately, my wood supply was at bare minimum. I was bringing up the son (Kyle) of a good friend of mine (Paul Milberry) in a couple of weeks to help out with my wood supply. I had offered him and his buddy, along with their wives, the chance to stay at the cabin as long as they cut me enough wood for the winter trapping season and fixed a few of the rough spots on the way to the cabin... they happily agreed.

A piece of the tin roofing made the perfect heat reflector for making baked potatoes.

Cooking breakfast over the open fire.

If you look at the photo above and to Ken's right and in the creek, you'll notice what is a bunch of willows in the water. Over the course of the summer, some beavers decided to dam up the creek and burrow into the bank right under the picnic table. The willows in the creek is their winter food supply, what trappers call their feed bed. The problem for me is the big tree behind Ken. The beaver have weakened the root system under the tree by putting their den there. The tree is ready to fall over and when it does, it's going directly into the creek, potentially plugging it up. If that happens, the only route the water from the creek is going to be able to take will be right through the cabin. Not good. The tree is going to have to come down. My plan is to take care of it when the creek is at its lowest, sometime in April or May, perhaps even June. It will require a few people and a lot of work to get it out of the creek because the tree is massive and has branches coming off it that are as big as trees themselves. I'm not looking forward to dealing with it at all.

In the meantime, my goal was to catch the beaver and get them out of there; however, something strange happened. When I came back in early November with the intent to catch the beaver, I found a beaver lying dead in a run not too far out from the cabin. I examined it and couldn't find anything wrong with it at all, even after skinning. I then set up five traps along the creek at obvious spots they were using. On my first check of the traps, not a single beaver had been caught, which is highly unlikely because beaver are easily caught in the sets I put up. I then broke the dam, lowered the traps I had up, and put two more sets in at the broken dam, which, guaranteed, the beaver would be coming to repair or face freezing out over the winter. On my next check, I caught just a single beaver but I'm positive it was a transient coming down the creek from further up, just based on where I caught it. A third check once again revealed empty traps. I refreshed all my sets and left for home. When I returned the following week, now with seven traps up, all of my traps were again empty, three of which were frozen in, and the dam I had opened up was still just as I'd left it. I'm convinced the beaver are all dead, based on the one I found that was already dead and the fact that they never tried to repair their dam. Perhaps, tularemia, which is a deadly disease for beaver, killed them all... The mystery remains.

One of my traps that was frozen in.

There has been hardly any snow so far this year at the trapline and the weather has been extremely warm, so it's been difficult to get anywhere on a quad without getting stuck. I hate trapping on a quad because they are rough to ride, get stuck a lot, take forever to get anywhere on, are cold to ride in winter, and limit you to the amount of stuff you can carry. They are terrible when compared to a snowmobile but snowmobile's need snow and without snow, I'm stuck on the quad.

Quads aren't good for trapping when compared to a snowmobile. Here I'm about to start setting my line.

In mid-November, I managed to get 47 sets up over a two-day span. A couple of my trails I can't get down by quad so they were left until I get more snow, which doesn't appear to be in the forecast anytime soon. The weather has been getting colder though so some of the soft spots are starting to freeze up, including Cabin Trail Road that has been a bitch to get down because it's pretty much a muskeg road. Many of my trails were covered in deadfall and some of the creeks I have to cross through caused me a lot of grief by getting me stuck. Several of my wooden boxes had been eaten by squirrels and porcupines and a couple of them had been smashed by bears. The bears do this because they can smell the remnants of bait and lure in and on the box. I replaced those ones with plastic boxes, which I've been slowly working towards doing completely. Over the two days, I worked like a dog to get the sets up and my trapline running; albeit, three weeks behind schedule.

One of my wooden boxes a grizzly decided to smash.

Several trees had fallen along my trapline route that had to be removed before I could pass.

In late November, I returned with good friend Paul Milberry, who hadn't been to my trapline before and really wanted to see and experience it, so I put him to work. One of our jobs was to build a bridge over a small creek that is easily crossed with a snowmobile but brutal on a quad that can never get through it without being stuck. The creek is about three-feet deep and not very wide but wide enough that it just sucks the front end of the quad straight down into it. When I first was stuck in it, the winch on the quad was driven straight into the opposite side of the bank, making it impossible to get at. It took me nearly and hour to get unstuck and out of the creek. Pierre and I had actually built a bridge here several years ago but over time, it was mostly washed away during high water times.

The small creek doesn't look like it would be difficult to get through but it is impossible on a quad.

Paul testing an older section of the bridge Pierre and I built a few years ago. 

The first trapline run of the year wasn't great and I'm convinced the logging they are doing on the south end of the trapline has severely affected my marten numbers. Last year was my poorest marten catch yet (5) and this year, I'm seeing very little in the way of sign even though the mouse, grouse and hare population looks to be quite healthy.

If you look distant in this photo, you can see some of the logging that's going on in the south.

As usual, the bait thieves are still at it. While I admire the ermine for its tenacity and hunting skills, they are a complete pain in the butt when it comes to marten, fisher and mink sets. They are either constantly stealing your bait, setting off traps without being caught, or being caught and taking a trap out of commission.

Paul with my first ermine of the season. The first of many I'm sure.

Another bait thief comes to its demise.

We only caught three ermine on this check but there were several boxes with traps that had been sprung and a few missing bait. The ermine can fit between the trigger wires if he takes care and doesn't get greedy trying to take the bait out of the box as opposed to eating it inside of the box.

I've been trying to get more sets up along the creek at various points because it adds to the possibility of what you might catch; meaning, a box along a creek has the potential to catch marten, mink and fisher. So, when Paul and I made a check of a new box I had placed along the creek, I was pleasantly surprised to see a big male fisher hanging there.

A big male fisher.

I may have mentioned this in a previous blog but I'll mention it again now. Fisher are remarkable creatures with incredible speed. They say that for as fast as a marten can catch a squirrel in a tree, the fisher can catch the marten in a tree. As well, the fisher, because of its speed, can hunt and kill porcupines. If you've ever come across a porcupine and tried to get in front of it, it's impossible. The porcupine will always keep its back to you where it is protected by its quills. However, the fisher is fast enough to get in front of a porcupine where its quills aren't as much of a threat before killing it. Killing porcupines is the fisher's specialty and usually a fisher will have a quill or two stuck in it.

This fisher, surprisingly, held no porcupine quills.

While I didn't catch any marten on the first check of the year, I'm remaining optimistic that the logging hasn't created too much of a disturbance and I'll still be able to catch a few. I'm still waiting for more snow, not only here on the trapline but also at the ranch where I trap coyotes. There is absolutely no snow there so trying to trail snare coyotes is difficult at best.

I spent some time in the Okanagan this summer visiting relatives and my Aunt Carol had a pleasant surprise for me. She had made me a neat wooden sign with a wood-burned scene on it of my cabin along the creek. It's really awesome and it now hangs on the inside of the cabin just above the door and below a set of moose antlers I have hanging there. Thank you Aunt Carol for a wonderful gift!

You can see Aunt Carol's work right below the moose antlers.

Well that's about it for this blog. I'm heading back up to the trapline first thing in the morning so I should have an update for you next week. Hopefully, it starts to snow a little and my catch picks up. Until next time!