The Fall Trapping Countdown Is On...
...Cleaning & Dying Traps
Every time that July rolls around I am eternally shocked that bear season is over and that fall hunting and trapping will be here in mere weeks. Usually I suppress those thoughts and focus on wood chopping instead of getting as prepared as possible for fall success… But, not this year.
This year I am out of a job and I am going to take full advantage of that by going all in on trapping this fall. As a part of that I will be setting up a wall tent to work from deep in the back country where my lines usually end. In order to prep, I made time to actually degrease some new traps and re-dye my old ones well before the season starts.
However, without a 55 gallon drum available (whoops, I guess I used too many for bear baiting) I had to get creative. Thankfully, I had a huge metal horse trough behind my place and figured I could use that to do all of my dirty work.
After commandering some cinder blocks from a neighbor, I got my daughter to help fetch wood and start a fire underneath the trough while we filled it with water. While we waited for the water to get to a low rolling boil (it took an hour or two), we pulled out all of our traps, snares, and anchors and laid them out in piles. Once the water was hot, we added some over-the-counter logwood trap dye and some pine and spruce boughs.
After stirring the concoction like a witches brew, in went each of the traps in different batches. About 1-hour per set was the ticket to get them each to a nice de-scented dark color. Given the number of traps, we kept the fire rolling and the traps soaking well into the evening. Once pulled and cooled we re-hung them and started to fantasize about fall and winter nights in our wall tent! Now on to waxing…
