Disclaimer. I know it’s way early to be baiting I usually don’t bother until April but I didn’t care this year. Combination of needing to get out of the house and having tracks on my side by side for the first time got me excited to put them to the test!
I am excited to be back out baiting bears after about a 2 year hiatus. Changing up my bait locations completely going from north of Bonnyville to north west of Mayerthorpe. Simply to cut down on travel time to baits and it’s on my route up to My spot and stalk area making it convenient to do both on one outing. Plan is to fill one tag on baits and one spot and stalk this year!
Excited about scouting new lands I started studying google earth for days to nail in some promising locations. Once I had that I moved to looking at the land owners maps and found some lease owners with contacts that matched some private that boarders crown, the crown I wanted in on! I Mustard up the courage to make the calls for permission as we needed to use their private quarters to get back there and made the calls (I always equate this to what it was like as teens asking a girl for a date! Afraid to get rejected or telling your buddies with excitement when u don’t haha)
Well excited to report I’m in!!! And they confirmed my instinct by telling me they have a problem with bears on their private lands and would like them gone!! Well I just so happen to know a guy
Fun part about this year is I have a buddy coming out on his first bear baiting experiences which is always a joy to introduce someone else to the world of baiting! So like two teenage boys we prepared for our dates. We started to strategize securing baits. My buddy made his first dumpster dives with success, I rekindled some old sources from here! (Was glad to see the bear baiting thread up and running still)
Once we had everything we needed (popcorn, beavers, grease, fish remains, oats, blue berry syrup, pastries) we headed up to the spot. We got up into the area unloaded the side by side, loaded the gear and headed into the bush!! Always love that feeling of the unknown adventure ahead.
We went straight to the spot we scouted on google earth to find it was even better than expecting. Large trees on a river bank with no chance bears could get down wind of us on common NW windy days unless they want to risk falling to their deaths also evening thermals should pull our sent down into the valley away from the bait. Some nice travel corridors coming into the bait area and water not to far away.
We set up the first bait site staging a cellular trail cam which will be my first go on baits and hoping it takes away from some of the useless travel up to check baits, only to find they haven’t been hit yet. Left a back up trail cam just incase the cellular doesn’t pic up for some reason.
After the first bait set we went back to the truck loaded the second round of gear and found a sweet spot just off the private. Have to say there is still 3 feet of snow out there but the tracked machine just plowed through and made baiting a breeze. Loves it!!
Got the second spot set up and equally excited about this spot as well. The plan is to see what spot starts getting hit first then pull the other barrel over and focus all the attention to the one site. I like to do this in a new area to increase chances of getting hit early.
Now we sit and wait haha. Stay tuned as I’ll keep this thread updated all the way through the journey. Cheers
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2020 Bear Hunt adventure!!
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