Planning out your Trapline
Determining Set Locations on a Northern MN Trapline
One of my favorite things is to go into new unfamiliar country and lay out a new trapline for a week or two. Every time I do it there is the excitement of traveling new roads and trapping new creeks. In my experience it either goes great or it’s an utter disaster and I go home with my tail between my legs. Although that still happens, I’ve found ways to reduce the chance of this happening. Below are a few useful tips you can use to aid in scouting out a new trapline. Normally I travel to water trap so the information will be skewed towards that, but I think the land trapper will find some useful info as well.
The first thing you need to do is get high level view of the area you’re interested in targeting. This could be a few square miles or a quarter of a state as a starting point. Normally I trap water, so I turn map to the white setting, this allows the blue water to show up better than on an arial map. I’ll scan the areas to see where the most water and bridge crossing are located. Once I find an area I’m interested in, I’ll turn of the topography map to determine how big the rivers are. I’ll also do the “street view” on top of the bridges to get an actual picture of the river. You don’t know if it was taken on a wet or dry year, but it gives you a pretty good idea. Google Maps is also great for scouting an area for land trapping. You can turn the arial view to see the lay of the land and look for two tracks, fence lines, stock tanks, and other useful landmarks.
“Google Maps and the internet has made scouting a new trapline far easier than in the days of plat maps, but don’t give up on the paper books quite so fast.”
Google Maps and the internet has made scouting a new trapline far easier than in the days of plat maps, but don’t give up on the paper books quite so fast. One downfall of Google Maps is that if you zoom out to far the smaller water on the map will disappear making it difficult in some situations. That’s where the paper maps come into play. There are a lot of maps showing watersheds online and the state atlases are also a great resource. I have a map with every watershed in Minnesota and this is extremely handy for looking for a new area to try. A combination of old school and modern maps can help get you in the right area without ever having to leave the house.
Gas is probably the most expensive input in running a line so we want to be wise with how we plan our line out. Try and set your line up so it’s a large loop so you don’t waste miles. That being said, there are times it’s better to travel some to get to better country where there is more fur present. For beaver trapping I’m better off driving some highway miles before putting the first trap in the water. It would take a lot of miles in the area near my house to even get a portion of the beaver I can get if I travel a ways first. Sometimes you’ll find an area where there is a good set of locations a mile or two off of your line but you have to back track some to get back to your main route. I’m totally fine with driving a mile down the road out of the way if it yields a few coon I wouldn’t have caught by not doing it.