Historical Sugar House Walk

Living in an area where they have quite a bit of maple trees and snow, we get the benefit of having what they call "Sugar Houses" which are what you would think they are, a place where they make sugar! The maple kind of sugar, that is.

I have fond memories as a kid going to my grandfathers house in the hills of Vermont and him having a fairly large tin full of maple syrup. We would make pancakes in the morning, douse it with butter and the delicious maple syrup. Those were the days man let me tell you! Lol. I look back on it though and think that it was kind of weird that we didn't really visit the Sugar House though, to see how the whole process was done! After we recently visited a few Sugar Houses though, I guess it's because you have to go up at a specific time of year, which we often did not.

Maple Syrup is one of those traditions for people who live in a climate that gets a fair bit of snow, has maple trees and people with a little bit of ingenuity! It takes quite a bit of work to do it all, but in the end the payoff is quite worth it.

It usually takes about 60 gallons of maple water from the trees to turn into one gallon of maple syrup. Those are some pretty crazy ratios! Depending on the temperature and some other factors, that number can end up being higher. This year, one of the maple syrup guys told us that he is currently needing to boil 130 gallons of maple water in order to get 1 gallon of syrup. That's pretty wild and much more than other years!

We went to a few Sugar Houses but I think this one was my favorite. They were very personable and they also had these awesome historical gems laid out all over the place! They were talking about how the maple taps were changing over the years, with there being all kinds of different ones. Some wooden ones, many metal ones, and more recently a lot of plastic ones of varying kinds. It was really interesting to see the evolution of the spikes and the other tools that they would use in order to get the stuff into the tree. A lot of times they would drill a hole, sometimes they would hammer it in. It varied between people but most often they would drill a hole so they could protect the tree and use it the next year.

The crazy thing about it too is the cost! The new taps, made of thick plastic, cost about 8$ per tap. That is pretty wild to me! I am thinking that 3D printing can certainly have some assistance for the people who are buying those things, but I think that will come with more time.

Most of the maple syrup people that are serious about it get a suction system like this. They start out with the typical metal pale hanging off the tap on a tree in order to get a few gallons of the water. That gets challenging though because you have to stay relatively close to the Sugar House or you need to get an ATV to load the buckets on and drive them back. Of course with the advent of various pieces of technology, they got better and better and the suction was started.

They tap the trees and then go around with many thousands of feet or miles of thin plastic piping and connect it to the trees and then connect those various lines to a central bigger line, to eventually land in this suction machine here. It then gets pumped from here into the big storage container, which is often a 500 gallon drum or two, for it to be processed. The challenge with the suction and tubing lines is that they often get trees falling on them and that means you gotta go out and inspect and figure out where the issue was, and fix it when you're out there. It is certainly better than hauling buckets lol but it does have it's own small challenges.

The guy we went to here has been doing it for 22 years and you can tell he is passionate about it. It's a hobby for him, he has other jobs that he does in the rest of the year but one of the things that's good about these types of hobbies and passions is that it occupies your time in an otherwise challenging time of year. Being out in nature, doing work to scout the trees, get the taps in there, lines and all that is a lot of work but it keeps you healthy! We often get a lot of exercise in the summer but not a lot in the winter. Doing all this stuff in the winter means you get a little bit of money but also something to do when you're cooped up in the house. I love that part about it!

We got to learn a fair bit about the local trees which I'm always a fan of. I love seeing the different kinds and then comparing them to what I know. There are easy ones like birch, pine and all that but we have a lot of other cool ones like ash, alder, dogwood and plenty of other ones I can't think of. They had a cool little display here which made it even more interesting!