3/19/08

8:30 AM, 27 degrees, barometer predicts precipitation. Wind E, calm. Skies clear with some haze on the E horizon. The dawn was orange-golden, suffusing the woods across the street with a soft rosy-pink glow. The roads should melt and the sap run today.
Yesterday there was no sap run, so only minor camp duties to perform. I went to the sugar bush for a bit in the late afternoon but there wasn’t really anything much to do.
I have to go to Grandview today and will miss the sap run, I hope they can handle it. On a good day an average tapped tree will produce 4 liters of sap, so that figures out to about 75 gallons of sap to lug to the sugar shack. A good tree may produce as much as 40 gallons of sap a season ( about a gallon of maple syrup). Hopefully Jim will be there with his snow mobile to haul sap buckets from the furthest stand of trees, about a quarter of a mile away.
Later: I got back by mid-afternoon and went out to the sugar bush. The sap was all hauled (lucky me) and Andy was beginning to cook. It takes hours, depending on the stoking of the fire, etc. to boil sap to syrup. Andy’s evaporator holds maybe fifteen gallons of sap. The sap moves through the separator from one end to the other by specific gravity, the less dense new sap flowing as it is heated to the more dense opposite end of the evaporator through a series of several baffles. The sap is heated to boiling, 219 degrees in the case of the current run of sap with about 2percent sugar concentration, and care must be taken not to overheat the sap and give it a burnt taste in which case it will be ruined. Once the process is started it has to be continually monitored. A hygrometer may also be used to determine the optimal sugar concentration, and I will have to watch closely to see how that is done, but the old timers and the Indians determined when syrup was ready by intuition. As the season goes on I will present technical information on syrup production and sap flow a little at a time. I cannot go to the sugar bush on Thursday, but will spend most of Friday there.
On the way back, coming down Cemetery Hill on Washington Ave., I could see east all the way across the Island and the open water to Michigan and the Gogebic Range and southeast to the Penoke Range, the high hills which are the worn down mountains of the Laurentian Shield, and a source of iron ore and its attendant wealth up to the 1960’s, when the deep mines were abandoned and replaced by the open taconite pits of Minnesota northwest of Duluth. Who knows, the deep mines may become economical again in the future and the good times roll once more in “The Three H’s, Hayward, Hurley and Hell.” I don’t know, maybe the tourists are a better lot to live with than the miners, maybe not.