The Ultimate Hunting Trip

...Or how to exceed your truck limits and get away with it.

This trip started with my cousin from Switzerland calling me saying he would like to go Moose hunting in northern Quebec. Dates were scheduled and the trip began a couple weeks ago.

We had to travel from Montreal to Sept-Iles (560 miles) with all the camping and hunting gear gear, canoe and trailer with ATV, all attached to my 2016 Taco. Yes, we had a freezer on board. We had an A/C plug in the truck, why not use it?

 

Day 2 had us down the road with a ferry to cross

 

Since we had an afternoon to kill waiting on the rest of the hunting team, we decided to drop the trailer at the motel and drive an exceptional winding road to go and see the Manic 5 Dam, the biggest arched dam in the world. A little detour of 280 miles. We were able to fully test the road abilities of the loaded truck with the cousin who is a certified rally driver. The results with ECT on were great but we were not completely satisfied with the delay in the transmision shifting. We compensated by "tapping" the pedal to the floor to downshift and lift it completely to upshift. We took turns driving and we both rated the suspension of th as one of the best handling for a pickup truck.

 

Since this is not a hunting site I will skip the actual hunt, but I will share some pics of what we saw when we reached the camp the next day while driving 2 hours of dirt/logging roads to reach the hunting camp. The AT3 tires were doing their job and we did cross every obstacle without any slipping. Among those obstacles were loose sand, loose gravel slopes, streams and rocky eroded slopes.

 

subed

 

Here is hunting camp and the prize.

 

Looking forward to seeing more pics from your trip. This is a dream hunt of mine. Ranks as high as trapping a wolf. Enjoy every moment! What kind of canoe do you have?

 

The real challenge was to get back home with 800 pounds of Moose meat in the truck fast enough so the meat would not spoil. Lucky for us the actual temp was well below freezing at night so we had about a day to run.

Now your manual says that the useful payload of the 2016 Taco is 1000 pounds including passengers. We loaded the moose meat, our camping and hunting stuff and two hunters in the truck, the canoe on top and attached the trailer with the ATV on the back. We estimated the actual load at 1400 pounds. At that point the back suspension had about an inch of play left so we tryed to lighten the back as much as we could. To do that we transfered the head, a couple tents and the spare tire to the trailer and hoped for the best.

The setup looked like this:

 

The thing that impressed us the most was that the whole setup rode extremely well. After feeling the truck, we were even able to overtake other cars and trucks while driving uphill. Anybody who criticize the little 3.5l engine simply on acceleration should try the truck overloaded going up a 10% slope. The total run home took a total of 12 hours, including the 2 hours of dirt + 560 miles of pavement. Moose meat was in great shape and we will be able to taste the steaks in a couple weeks. Overall we reached the limits of the truck, but it was well beyond our expectations.

What a great vacation. And a great truck!

 

The canoe is a Old Town Penobscot 16. Old and worn out but still strong enough to carry half a moose.