We planned to put it up at the end of the summer, when we first finished the new maple syrup barn, but of course, stuff intervened. We wound up heaving this 600-gallon monster steel tank up into the maple syrup storage loft only after the first snows had come, making it all the harder and heavier. The opening up there was built with this tank in mind (as well as bringing up 55 gallon drums of maple syrup), but that didn’t stop me and Robert from arguing whether it would or wouldn’t actually fit when the moment came. In the end it did, but not with much in the way of room for error.

Robert and I heaved it up onto its small side and lifted it over our heads to the point where the boys could grasp it from above. Problem was, they couldn’t quite reach down all the way to the tank, even standing on its side, so one had to hold the other out the window a bit to grab a hold. It was not a pleasant site to see when standing below the tank pushing upward with all one’s might.

Somehow they managed, man-handling the tank to stick straight out so as to fit inside. Heard lots of grunting and scuffling up in there. While transfixed by this, stairing up at the rising tank, it occured to me that standing 16 feet below this precarious situation wasn’t too clever. Had it fallen on my head, I probably would have dented it. So I stepped aside and took these photos while they walked the tank all the way into the barn’s second floor.

This tank will hold the sap coming down from Hubbard Hill, our smaller bush with 550 trees. We have a new vacuum (or new to us at least) to set up, and that’ll keep us in plumbing for a few weeks to come. On the other side of the loft, we store the large barrels of finished bulk and wholesale maple syrup.

Running lines this time of year exposes you to the most beautiful views that don’t make Vermont Life magazine. Images of towering cloud systems moving too fast between close hills, trees losing large portions of their leaves all in a moment with the first strong gust of the fall. If gray days sold tourism, you’d see all of this on the postcards streaming from Vermont, but they don’t. These days are for farmers and maple syrup makers.

Coming down I-91 and turning into the Thetford exit, I turned away from home, heading up Five Corners Road where some friends of mine once lived, where I knew they had a view of my maple syrup operation. I needed the distance view to contemplate where the maples are, and where the topography is, and where that happy combination can marry them together, letting me use that line I’m hauling to carry maple syrup sap down to where we can collect it in March.

I set in my rig for a minute or two looking at this view. This time of year is one of a couple where you can tell the maples from the rest of the forest because they turn more quickly, and to a distinctive yellow. It’s a great scouting technique, and makes for a great excuse to do some productive driving around town in the turn of the fall, figuring out who might own some unused maples the rights to which might be prized free with some well placed maple syrup.

I have not yet met the man who bought the house of my friends, and I realize it must look odd, were someone to see me, looking past his home on the side of the road off into space.

The man who farms across the street from this house is a friend of mine. He, it turns out, helped make maple syrup some 50 or 60 years ago on the same bush I sugar, driving horses uphill to the old sugar shack on top. He makes maple syrup nowadays from the trees along this road. My friends who once lived here across from him told me the story of when they made the mistake of mentioning to this sugarmaker that his new sugarlines didn’t quite have the same character that the buckets once did with their “plinks” and “planks” as the afternoon droplets fell into the galvanized steel pails. They were mortified to see that the next day he’d replaced his new lines with the old buckets by their house, just for them. It’s that sort of place still.

A group of bowhunters looks to be eying me from where the trees meet the field. I start the rig and move on, as they probably think that I’m scouting that eight-pointer they didn’t get last year (and won’t get this year). I can’t fool with deer because I’m a fool for the maple syrup, but that’s not comfort for them.

In the first half of the 20th Century, a fellow named Jessie Messier made maple syrup here in a sugar house between the two peaks of Cooks Hill. This is that sugar shack pictured below, standing mutely as I climb the ridges to either side of it, up and down and then up and down again running the lateral line.

Just within five or ten years ago another fellow owned the land and sugared the side closest to the road, but not these trees. He definitely had ambitions of running line way the heck out here; you can tell from the way he set up the dendrology of his line system. To get this sap down to the sugarhouse, we’ll have to run a mainline across a little corner of a neighboring property, but the nice woman who owns that wood lot to the north thankfully thought the idea a good one.

I estimated 250 trees at first in this back section of the lot. After scouting it a few extra times with my brittanys, I figured maybe as many as 350. I’m about half-way done now, and I’ve run line past 341 trees. If it goes past 600 maple trees, I’ll have to go buy more line. It’ll be quite an addition to the main sugarbush, especially as I’ll be able to run it on down to the sugar shack and the vacuum system we have hooked up there.

And we also managed to score some of the new, experimental purge valve tap doohickies out of Proctor Maple Research Center. It’ll be interesting to see if they live up (or down) to the expectations people have of them.

There are two other yet-to-be-tapped sections on the property. Those two might together provide another 1,500 trees, but the topography is such that gravity will never bring it back up to the main sugarhouse by the road. We’d have to run a half mile of mainline down through a couple neighboring properties and stick a tank down by Sawnee Bean, pumping it into some sort of transfer vehicle once or twice a day. With that many trees it’ll be worth it, but that will be quite a bit of effort to get that up and going. Probably next year. Already got it mapped out and the neighbors on board. Once that happens, it’s hard to let the idea sit.

In particular, we bolted on an I-beam just under the ridge beam, allowing a wheeled trolley to slide back and forth with very heavy loads. You can see from the picture on the right that we made the beam pop out the second story doors, allowing us to hoist loads from trucks below.

And given that our 55 gallon barrels of maple syrup weigh about 650 pounds, we added a surprisingly cheap winch crane to attach to the trolley. If this contraption doesn’t kill one of us, it’ll be very handy. Most of our bulk maple syrup, intended for wholesale use, will be hoisted up into this second story for storage over the year.

Once the barrels make it through the doorway, we can drop them onto dollies and push them around. To accommodate this, the floor system up there was built 12-inch-on-center, with heftier stringers than you’d put in a residential structure.

Just because they felt like it, the boys opted to build the barn post-and-beam. Its a pretty old-timey structure, with about all of the design conforming to specific sugaring use. That seemed like a compromise at first, but it’s the more beautiful for it.

Robert and the boys have since thought they  might build these sorts of structures for other folks, seeing how smoothly this one went up. They went and created the site Vermont Cedar Cabins and have been doing some work in this line.

Meanwhile, back at the barn, we need to get the 600 gallon sap tank installed up top. Lots of vacuum plumbing yet to be done. That tank will have a four-inch pipe coming out of it, where we can operate a big butterfly valve from below to start the sap filling up our utility vehicle tank for transport over to the sugar shack. This’ll be quite a tweaking process. It doesn’t take much time for a four-inch pipe of sap coming from 18 feet off the ground to get someone wet. Should be interesting.

I’ve set up a small finishing room in the back, and that’s been working out nicely. We’ll be able to get the barrels up stairs started with heating (purchased a used barrel warmer), and then pipe it on down to get to sterile temperatures for packing.

[It's easier to remember to turn on the valve in the first place]

That’s when you go to the Thetford General and grab some of those silly chemical hand warmer things that they sell to New Yorkers and Bostonites passing through. Duct tape them to the line, and voila, you have a cleared pipe and a working valve.

I think I’m going to leave that up there so that in the fall the deer hunters will have something to wonder about.

That column of water on the left is hitting the ceiling and showering down all over the vacuum room. I had the clever idea to test to see if I’d hooked up the correct plugs by flicking the sap extractor’s electronic trigger. Well, it worked to show me the plug was in the wrong place. Always good to have someone capturing the moment, too.

Today’s run was very, very small. Just enough for a nice shower. Trees are still deeply cold, although tomorrow’s predicted warm rain might change that.

Ellie and I patched up enough vacuum leaks out in the forest to get the Strafford bush up to about 20 bars of mercury. That’s about as high as I want to go. 30 bars of mercury is the vacuum of space. 21 bars of mercury is about where researchers have shown harm can be done to the maple trees (this, despite the fact that the maple equipment dealers insist that 24+ vacuum systems are harmless – they must just know it in their bones). 20 bars is just about right.

Here’s the scale to go by…

0-13 bars – Not much happens (although sufficient for sap ladder construction)

13-15 bars – You might see 125 percent the normal amount of sap

16-19 bars – You’d probably expect to get half again as much sap as you’d get without vacuum

20-21 bars – You might get 180 to 200 percent of the normal sap flow

22-24 bars – Maple equipment dealers get a warm fuzzy feeling. The trees show larger internal staining.

25-29 bars – Maple logs come screaming down your main lines

30 bars – You are in orbit, and you’re unlikely to be making maple syrup

Back in Thetford Center, I got the vacuum system up and going. It started off at 7 bars, which is par for the course. It’s always interesting to see where it’ll settle at first, once the ice melts for the first time in the year. I was able to patch lines (why in the world would a deer want to chew a sap line when my wife’s perfectly good apple saplings are right next to them?) and see the vacuum level rise to 10 bars before it got too late. We’ll get that forest up to 19 or 20 bars by sap time tomorrow. I don’t even want to calculate how far I’ve trudged in deep snow today with tens of pounds of tools on my back. When Spring flirts with us again tomorrow, bringing with her a bevy of sap, it’ll all be worth it.

Last year we had another close call, with a lot of ice, but less damage that one might expect. Perhaps we do so well in ice storms because this bush was really snockered back in the 1998 ice storm, where whole groups of trees were wiped out. Having all of the more vulnerable trees knocked out of the system, maybe this bush is just a bit more resilient. That’s probably too optimistic a perspective. I’m going to stick with the idea that we were just lucky.

Many people who make maple syrup will not tap trees the next year or two if they’ve been damaged by ice storms. There are two theories about that: the cautious people think that tapping is just one more stress on over-stressed trees. The other people figure that there is so much stress from crack wounds after an ice storm, that taking what you can get via the tap is an insignificant addition. I count myself among the more cautious people.

The ice storms in 07 and 08 brought home to me the benefit of having a split bush – that is a maple forest that sits in two different places. While very inconvenient for sap transport, this diversity does allow a maple syrup operation to hedge some in terms of weather disasters. This allows us to think about major equipment purchases without the worry that some years we’ll have zero revenue.

We had quite a set of snow storms a couple weeks before Christmas 08. I heard we had 32 inches after having practically no snow at all this fall and winter so far. It certainly seemed that deep. Here is a picture (above) of the woodshed with the snow. That big rock on the right was just at my sternum level when I set it there, so that snow would be easily past my knees.

How about the squirrels? Kept the ones from New England off the lines, but it’s just a matter of time before the Texan ones arrive.