[KegRiver]

I never bothered with dirt holes after freeze up. There are too many alternatives.

A pile of dry grass covering the bait works almost as well once the ground is frozen. Burying bait in snow does pretty much the same thing as a dirt hole.

A mound of dry sand, or ant hill dirt makes a decent dirt mound that will not freeze.

It seemed to me that the point of a dirt hole was two fold; to keep birds from stealing the bait and to make the target animal work a bit for the bait, which takes it's mind off dangerous traps.

I always thought that those goals could be covered pretty well with the alternatives.

But I do have to add, I didn't do much Coyote trapping and even less dirt hole or dirt hole alternative trapping. Marten, Fisher, Lynx and beaver were worth more, easier to catch and as plentiful or in many cases, more plentiful.

On top of that I could pull in as many Coyotes with trail sets, both leg hold and snare as I could with dirt hole sets and with a lot less time and effort.
So for me dirt hole sets were only worth my time before the more valuable fur became accessible. Which was only after freeze up.

My registered line was on the far side of the Peace River from the nearest road access, and it had a lot of wet ground that one could not access till after freeze up. Because of those factors it was not practical to try to trap most of it until after freeze up. So I trapped the few Coyote we had while waiting for freeze up. And after freeze up only bothered with easy sets for Coyote.

We never did have the numbers of Coyote you folks have down south. We still don't. If I took ten a year that was the bulk of the population on my line. I could pick up another twenty or so from the local farms but that was hardly worth it. It meant driving a lot of miles for very little return.
But I did do it some, for the challenge more then anything.

In all honesty, I could and did make more money trapping Squirrels and Weasel then I did trapping Coyote. There were no Fox in the area back then and not many Wolves.
Not like today. Now there are Wolves everywhere and plenty of Fox as well.
But about the same number of Coyote as there always were.