After a fantastic afternoon/evening on the pond yesterday and rain forecasted for Sunday, Saturday morning French and I headed down the Southern Shore to do some backcountry off-trail snowmobile riding/exploring and maybe fit in a little coyote hunting as well.

Today I would be riding Project Powertek REV while French took his beautiful 2022 Yamaha VK540. Although his machine is three years old, it's only now registering the final few kilometres for its new vehicle break in!

We left the trucks and headed in the awesome Southern Shore Trailway before hooking a left onto an old woods path. Weather today was a little better than yesterday with sunny skies and temperatures hovering around -1ºC. Winds were light in the morning but set to become moderate in the afternoon.

This trail through the woods was super twisty, and off camber due to four feet of frozen snowdrifts which were a ton of fun to navigate. Although snow is very deep, it is hard packed with a surface just loose enough to keep my liquid cooled 800cc motor perfectly cool.

French's VK placed in low range navigated the tight trails with ease.

Backcountry adventures continued, with snow this deep and hard packed we could literally point the skis towards anything white and let-R-rip! It was the most fun riding I've done in a very long time.

The only issue I had today was that I fouled a sparkplug after an extended period of slow speed twisty woods path riding. These were last replaced in 2023 on my trip to Indian Bay with Dad. Between the age and still running a little three year old fuel diluted with fresh I'm not disappointed having to perform a quick trailside repair.

It's amazing that even after all the snow we received this year, and a week of very cold temperatures, how some bogs just don't freeze up!

All of the ponds in this area were covered in glare ice, here and there along our journey we jumped off the ponds and ran the Southern Shore Trailway before jumping back onto the barrens.

We really enjoyed exploring a lot of brand new (to us) backcountry as neither French nor I have ever snowmobiled down this way before!

After a mid afternoon pond side lunch of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee we hopped on the machines heading in the general direction back towards the trucks.

Around 4pm we retrieved French's new Tikka 22-250 rifle and my coyote caller and headed back in the trail to set up a coyote hunt before dark.

My trusty FoxPro Spitfire continues to work great after many years of service. I checked over the unit the evening before and replaced the 9v battery in the remote control.

I set up the caller about 60 yards out in front of us while we positioned back in the tree line out of the wind. There was a lot of coyote sign in the area, but with snow crusted over they were not leaving fresh tracks. This made it difficult to determine the best location to set up our hunt today.

Although we never lured in any prey this day, it was great to get out and make a set. At least this tested our gear getting us ready for the next hunt in better (less windy) conditions.

All in all it was another absolutely fantastic day in the country, one of the very best backcountry rides we've had in probably eight years of more logging over 52km on the machines. Trail riding is fun, but there is nothing better than running at speed over what is normally very rough terrain. Today we had deep snow with a sold base which buried the majority of obstacles such as rocks and stumps. Hopefully the warm weather this coming week doesn't mess up our fantastic snow conditions too bad, stay tuned to see what else we get up to this winter.

Cheers, MIKE

Copyright © 2025 Michael Smith