Today Bassan and I headed into the county towards a new (to us) area the Red Gullies for a day of ice fishing. It's a bit of a ride to get there but trail conditions are great as temperatures have dropped after a brief mild spell last week. Bassan would be piloting his 1997 Foreman 400 while I loaded up my fishing & boil-up gear onto the racks of Project Foreman.

Riding conditions were great with lots of ice on the ponds, snow was deep but thoroughly compacted packed on all trails.

We did find a couple soft spots on the ponds where melt water gathered and wasn't fully frozen, when we stayed on the commonly used path across each pond everything was frozen quite well.

We arrived at the Red Gullies around 10am and got to work setting out lines. We spent the morning moving them all around the pond searching for the ever elusive hot spot.

It was extremely windy at the bottom of the pond but much better at the top of the pond as we were tucked in under the hill so we gathered some fire wood for our boil-up.

On the lunch menu today was bottled moose French and I made a couple weeks ago mixed with instant rice.

I cooked up our feed on my MSR Superfly stove using the Primus Winter Fuel canister, once again the stove ran flawlessly even in these freezing temperatures. Regular ISO Butane canisters don't work very well as the temperature approaches the freezing mark, greatly reducing the BTU's of the appliance.

My Sea to Summit collapsible X-pots worked great today and were perfect for this trip as space in the box on my bike is limited, I even broke out my Sea to Summit X-bowl & Cup on this adventure. Bassan brought coffee and homemade raisin tea biscuits for desert!

With no luck on Red Gullies we packed up our gear mid-afternoon and headed back out the trail to fish some of the ponds we crossed on our way in.

We finally found some luck on Half Moon Pond. I landed a couple beauty pan size mud trout just after sunset on my Automatic Hook Setting ice fishing rigs, while we both released quite a few juvenile trout.

All and all it was an awesome first ATV ice fishing trip for the season, an great ride and a lot of fun exploring more new (to us) territory.

Cheers, MIKE

Copyright © 2025 Michael Smith