Traps Washed Out
This has been one wet year, lots of mud and some major floods. We don’t worry to much about floods, being way up in the hill country, but we have many area saints that live in the lowlands and river valleys. Yesterday we had some heavy rain and we are already 10 inches above normal for the year. The ground can’t take anymore. Many area roads were washed out last night and many creeks and streams jumped the roads and did some damage. None of this would have effected me in the least, except…..yeterday morning we finished laying out our coonline down along a deep valley stream. I don’t normaly run a waterline, but this year I did. I spent alot of time carefully building cubbys out of shale right on the edge of the stream, which are now but a memory. Everything needs to be rebuilt and rebaited. Now I remember why I always do dryland coon sets. The problem is there is no “dryland” to trap and mud dosen’t sift very well, so we figured on water trapping. I still have some conibear buckets to set out, someday I’d like to use just them for coon. I really can’t justify buying more traps now, so I use what I’ve got. Well, at least its just a small line, brings back memories of the Alaska line we ran. You would get many miles of fox and wolf sets out and the weather would warm up and start to melt the snow and then drop back down to -40 and freeze the sets up. We would have to go over the whole thing busting out traps with an ax and resetting them. Or it would snow a foot or so and you would have to dig em out. The marten sets were all little cubby boxes with 110 conibears in them, so they were easy. Just pull them out of the drift and set them on top of it. Oh, the memories. I can almost see the little cabin and smell the wood smoke and taste the old fashioned “boiled coffee”. Somewhere out in the bush, the little Canada Jays are perched on a limb waiting for the breakfast scraps. The little buggers are found of pancakes you know. OK, back to the real world…..I’ve got to go feed the girls some more hay.
November 22nd, 2006 at 11:19 am
What do you do with the coons, Isn’t it too early for pelts? Is there a market for coon pelts. Never trapped coons before. Just wondering.
November 22nd, 2006 at 5:36 pm
We trap them for their pelts. They are borderline prime right now. The thing with coon trapping is that as soon as the weather gets real cold, they den up. We will trap them until freeze up and then switch over to running mink line. When the snow gets deep we will most likely break some trail with snowshoe and set for fox and coyote. Depends on work load and weather. Coons are supposed to bring $10 or so this year, we will have to see. They are talking like muskrats could average $8! The word is fur is going to be worth some money this season. Buyer swings through town on Dec 5th, so I’ll let you all know what our coons bring.