We’ve been pretty busy in the past few weeks, running lines, tapping and moving equipment to the Strafford sugar shack. That’s where we’ll be making most of the maple syrup this year, rather than in our Thetford Center shack. We’ve grown to the extent that we need the extra capacity.

Today we had our annual Town Meeting here in Thetford. Road Foreman? Off sugaring. Fire Chief? Ditto. I should have been too. The weather wasn’t the greatest for it (not cold enough these last few nights), but it sure would have helped to make up for some lost time. Now that the budget’s passed, we can get serious.

This morning we had an

acquaintance of ours from across town attempt to drop in via hot air balloon.

The wind didn’t quite cooperate, but we were able to exchange hellos. He runs a

balloon ride business over in the village of Post Mills. Got me to thinking

what sort of air current effects he’d have experienced had our 16-inch stack

been going at full throttle.

Today, we are apparently seeing the sap visit as well, with the temperatures cooperating once more. Maple syrup should arrive tonight. We’ll be boiling in a couple hours. I can’t wait.

There is a disease going around the bat populations, called the white nose fungus. It causes bats to, among other things, leave their temperature-save hibernation places early, causing them to use up their calories and essentially starve before the weather gets warm enough for them to hoover up enough bugs to keep going.

This picture is of a bat trying to catch some Zs on the side of Thetford Town Hall, right by the door. He’s been there a bunch of days, and we’ve had nights below 10 degrees, so I suspect he’s not going to make it.

One oldtimer rhyme runs, “Wind from the east, sap runs the least. Wind from the west, the sap runs the best.” Our wind (about 5 mph) came from the east, but that’s a pretty lame breeze to matter so much. Here’s a picture of the wind pushing our steam toward the setting sun.

Nevertheless, we’re happy for what we receive, allowing us to finish off our first 55 gallon drum of maple syrup. Now we just need to figure out how to lift it.

The evaporator ran well – one of those days you regret having to shut down because the rig seems to be on a roll, pushing off more steam than seems probable. Here is John stoking the draw-off side while his friend, Addy keeps an eye on the temperature while the maple syrup keeps rolling off. Our stack temperature ran up to 650 degrees, even without the use of softwood.

Speaking of wood, we may or may not have enough this year. We had a truck load of wood delivered some mornings ago. This little pile is really meant for next year, but we’ve started to eye it. Note how some of those sugar maple stems are running sap out of the sapwood, even as they lie cut. I have half a mind to affix a couple buckets on them to see what sort of quantity we could get out of them, especially as they’re visible from the road.

I visited a maple syrup maker across town this morning on my way back from the post office this morning. He has a 42 inch by 12 foot arch, not very different from ours, so I’m stealing ideas from them in terms of how to fire the evaporator.

[The Maple Syrup "choo choo"]

Again, we had neighbors, friends and a few strangers stop by to see what could possibly be generating this much steam. I was told by one that they could see steam coming out of the valley of the West Branch of the Ompompanoosuc from a couple miles south of us. I was tempted to drive over just to see.

[Low pressure weather tends to make steam seem thicker]

[One of our boils, throwing about 100 gallons of water from already-concentrated sap into the air]

The weather report tells us that it should be just about perfect maple syruping weather for the next 8 days. But you need to put that in perspective: just a few degrees up or down, or a little bit of wind, will knock down that maple sap. And the weather is seldom accurate, certainly persistently accurate. Here is an image of the 10-day forecast.

Note that there are a couple days in the week where the temps at night don’t go below freezing. That means that the trees won’t “recharge” much for the next day, but with our vacuum system, we can still pull a good amount of sap out of the trees that buckets generally would not. That means that we might have a couple all-night runs. We hope to make lots of maple syrup this week. If that weather prediction proves true (would be a first), we’d make 250 to 300 gallons of maple syrup over the period.

Generally, maple syrup producers watch the weather with great diligence, delving into the 15-minute interval forecasts. Lots of decisions are made based on this data, such as when to turn on or off the vacuum devices, and most of the data turns out to be wrong. I know a few oldtimer maple syrup producers who just go about their business with the expectation that the weather will conform to them just about as much as they’d conform to it, and it’s maddening to see that they’re usually right.

[Visitors can't help themselves]

We didn’t make much maple syrup. The wind knocked down the sap flow in the second half of the day. We took in about 600 gallons of new sap, putting most of that sugar into the pans, and not drawing off much – perhaps three gallons of maple syrup. Once this arch starts rollicking along, it’ll be throwing about 10 gallons of maple syrup per hour of maple syrup.

To get that to happen, we need our reverse osmosis machine working, and that’s been a bit of a chore. Ours, you see, is about as old as I am, and a lot crankier. Today it exhibited three distinct personalities, behaving very differently with the same control settings. I think we’re past a plumber, and we need either a psychologist or an exorcist. But it wouldn’t be maple syruping if we weren’t breaking something expensive.

[Jupiter passing over the Strafford bush the night before tapping]

Coming up Sawnee Bean Road, adrenaline pumped through me when I could first catch sight of the Strafford property. I wondered if I’d be able to sleep that night, with the prospect of getting tapped the next day. The Strafford bush lay up at the end of a valley that wends down Barker Brook way, through to Thetford and merging with the valley of the Ompomanoosuc River. When people in Thetford drive north on route 113, they look left up through both of those valleys and see a field up at the very top, bordered by trees. They wonder where that is, and why it always has snow when the ground in the valley lay bare. When I drive that way, I look up and my pulse quickens, knowing the potential of those trees and of all the work we’ve put in to get them there.

After putting away the equipment for the next day at the Strafford sugar shack, I stepped outside to watch the trees and listen. Enough wind was up to keep twigs in the canopy rattling against one another. I again thought I must be mistaken about Jupiter and that it must be some sort of man-made light source. It was just so large.

In the starlight I could make out the lightly swaying trees in their little depressions in the snow that indicate sugar season is about to start. Robert had mentioned that it would snow Sunday, which only made me more eager. While other sugarmakers would hold off a day tapping, we were ready with new lines, all above the snow. No blizzard would be able to slow us. We’d be done by lunch, another eleven hundred holes drilled, tapped and hooked to the mainlines running down to the shack.

By this time, I’d decided the light was Jupiter – a friendly presence often visiting during late night boils. It reminded me of Robert Frost writing a couple generations ago about Orion looking in on the doings of a man, arriving by “throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains.” I turned to the east to see just that, Orion having risen in Jupiter’s path up over Tug Mountain.

I write this now Sunday evening. We are tapped out. Monday and Tuesday will be cold, and no sap will run – thankfully, as we have much work to do in the sugar shack to be ready to boil and make maple syrup. Wednesday will be warm enough to warrant testing the vacuum system, and then Thursday and Friday, the gates of spring will open, heralded by the rushing sound of sap coming off of Hubbard Hill through lines we’ve directed to the flat below.

[The Vermont Security System, patent pending]

Coupled with being right across from the house, this has worked to keep the sugar shack safe. But friends and family have a poor record of remembering where they put this shard of siding after they take it out of the hasp. This winter I found an easy solution to that, with all the icicles forming on our standing seem roof, I’ve taken to using them as handy latch clasps, as pictured below at night. The ice even reflects moonlight and starlight to act as a convenient marker when groping for the door.

Best still, it is a natural indicator of the arrival of sugar season. Yesterday, the lock came undone, melting through in the afternoon heat of 33 degrees. I came home to find the sugar shack open, and when I went to investigate I found not a visiting friend, but shards on the ground by the door showing winter is broken. We’d better get ready.

Long story short: it took me a couple hours just to wade out there and heave the branches off, some of which proved to be rather a bit larger than I’d expected once I levered them out of the snow. I very distinctly remember squinting down the hill at the shack, wondering what the relative energy expense would be heading down to get a chainsaw and coming back versus manhandling a few hundred pounds of sugar maple. Had I known, I would have gone for the saw.

By the time I freed the lines, it had grown dark. I’m eyeing the 500 trees we have yet to run by the lines, and I’m thinking it’ll be a close thing before the weather breaks for the sap season.

Moving through the snow carrying some tens of pounds of tools and fittings makes me think of astronauts lumbering around the moon, with movement restricted, moving slowly and accomplishing relatively little over an extended time. Everyone says it, but no one actually does it: we need to get this stuff done in the fall, before it snows.