Four and a bit days on the mountain
Mar. 1st, 2026 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unicorndukeMost of this was typed up Friday evening and is only somewhat coherent but that gives you a sense of how tired I was.
This became The Big Push to Get Shit Done for Maple Syrup. My whole body is sore. Wednesday was my first day on the mountain this week, replacing drops. We do maple syrup on a small/medium scale by tubes, around 600 taps. Smaller or more old fashioned producers do spouts and buckets where the buckets hang from the spouts or at the bottom of trees but that works best on flatter ground accessible by vehicle or horse drawn sleds. They also need to be emptied every day. We have a small mountain.
It is still a mountain. Actually, I think technically it is a ridge at the top of it, which isn’t where we are working, it’s further up and to the right of the below photo where my uncle’s orchard is. I don’t have a good sense of how high it is. In the view, we go up to the top of what is visible straight ahead and a little to the right.
We cross the creek over the extremely interesting bridge my dad has (a trailer frame with boards bolted to it. It used to be three sagging logs held together by boards, so I’m thrilled with this development), then either go left or right depending on which end of the lines we’re working on. This is about 700ft linear up to the first main collection line using the old logging trails. I have done some eyeballing of topo maps and such and it appears to be around 200 feet in elevation which is a 30% slope. This is not the steepest area of the mountain we climb for the maple syrup. And it is only to the first main collection line. It’s probably another 50-75 feet in elevation to the second main line and another 100 or 150 to the top of the ridge.
The interesting thing about physics is that if you have more than some amount of slope in your tubing lines, it will actually create a vacuum and suck the sap out of the trees and increase yield. It’s super cool. If you don’t have the elevation, you do boring things like put pumps on the lines.
We do big 1 inch lines as our main lines, two of those run down the mountain and converge to the pipe that crosses the creek. The 3/8 inch lines run off the main lines, around 22 smaller lines per main line. Each of these small lines has 3 to 23 taps on a line wiggling back and forth across the mountain to hit the maple trees. Larger trees can have more than one tap. Minimum size tree is around 12inch diameter to get one tap.
In this beautiful drawing below, I have demonstrated how this looks on the mountain. The two main lines we have run along the face of the mountain, so somewhat level in elevation with a slight downward elevation to the line that runs down the hill. The tapping lines run back and forth along the uphill slope around the trees which are the brown dots in the drawing so the trees hold the lines taut and off the ground. If the line were on the ground, it could cause issues with dips in the line accumulating gross stuff and makes it more likely that the squirrels will bite them.
The taps are connected to their 3/8 inch lines by what we call drops. They are a 24 inch tube with a t on one end connects to main line) and the spout (part that goes in the tree). The lines get gross year to year and we can flush cleaner into the lines, but we can’t flush the drops because they are designed that the sap goes in the spout and down into the line. So it’s hard to get it to work against gravity. And vacuum. So we replace half the drops each year.
Replacing the drops is a lot of standing and carrying a boat load of supplies. Also is a good time to fix issues on the lines. A huge problem, no joke, is animals biting the lines to get at the sap. Squirrels and bears are the biggest culprits. But also tree branches come down, etc.
Geared up for drops
Wednesday, I headed up the hill to do drop replacement. My dad taught me how to do it using this nifty tool. I have uploaded a video onto youtube here which is a simple, easy replacement of a drop. Since the t is in the line, I clamp the tool onto either side of the line beyond the previous t, cut both sides of it, ream out older tubes so they expand enough to fit the t, carefully place the new t into the lines, guide it into the tubes and once it will go in properly, press it closed so the tubes stay on the t. This really requires three hands to do, so I brace one handle of the tool on my bicep and curl that hand around to the other handle. The main issue is that the older tube has either stretched and tightened up or is just not as wide as the newer tubing, so it is really easy to catch the inner tube and crimp some of it into the interior of the tube which will clog the line. So it requires putting pressure on the handles while guiding the t into the tubes just so. An easy one will take me around two minutes. Difficult ones can be up to 15 minutes. Here is a video of that. You get a great look at the condition of my work coat.
If the clamps are too loose, the lines will slip out of the tool and then you must trudge down several trees worth and climb back up holding tension. It sucks. Sometimes the lines stretch and get narrower so adjusting the clamps on the go is necessary. Sometimes the old t’s are too close together or there is an issue with the tubing. Then we use these cool tools that look like E’s with rope between them to hook the lines together to maintain tension on the tubes.
I did this all day, taking lunch break around noon. I do leave the mountain for lunch because it’s cold and wet on the hill. The snow still hasn’t fully melted off the mountain as of writing this part friday evening because of the north facing slope. In fact, I’ve found areas where the previous snow storm (the 18 inches from beginning of Jan) is still present.
Some pictures of the mountain
This video was taken at the top of the mountain, at the top of the second main line's tapping lines. The flatter area at the start of the video is the edge of our property line.
Honestly, it’s so much fun on the mountain. It’s so hard. But it’s quiet, the work is satisfying and it’s a physical challenge. I got done 2/3 of the drops done on Wed.
Thursday, my dad had to finish making the rest of the drops, so I waited a bit to get back on the mountain until they were done. It takes probably 15 minutes to do the walk up to the first maple line, so it is really worth it to wait for supplies and take everything up at once.
I struggled with some of the lines Thursday, they were awfully behaved. But! I did get them all done. Lunch was at 2pm. It doesn’t make sense to stop in the middle of a line or on the way up, so once I was on a line, I wanted to finish it and work one back down. But not all the lines are the same length, some are quite long, so deciding to do two more can take over an hour. Thankfully the last few lines went quickly and I was able to get all the drops done that afternoon.
For the other half of the lines, we just were replacing the spouts, using last year’s drops (unless they are gross), so I finished that off Friday morning. My dad and one of the employees had done most of that, but I focused on the second line’s steepest section. It is so steep that sometimes it is easier to crawl up or slide down on my butt or sitting sideways even with the crampons. In some spots, it is probably a 45% slope by my eyeball. It’s so steep. I finished those lines and broke for early lunch.
After lunch, I start tapping trees! My dad was out finishing line fixing and replacing gross drops, but he started on the first line and I came behind.
Tapping is quite easy once all the prep work is done. I carry a drill, a hammer, wire for cleaning the hole, extra battery and a snack. I usually leave my water bottle near the main line and break for it once or twice a tapping session but not always.
Procedure for tapping is: find last year’s tapping hole (marked with spray paint when it got pulled), go over two inches and up or down six inches depending on what the drop reaches. Level drill, then tilt just a smidge so the hole will be slightly downward, drill hole to spacer on drill bit, use wire to clean wood bits out of hole, grab spout, tap spout into tree with hammer. Trudge to next tree and repeat. Can’t hit the spout too hard or you can split the hole (did that at first, oops). Video here.
I got 14 of 22 lines done on the first line, but the first 10 of them were shorter, so I just checked the tap records and I’m around 109 taps into our 644 total, so not too bad.
Saturday, we had an employee come and also my dad, so a crew of three on the mountain. We tapped all day and got almost all of it done! There was three shorter lines left when it was around 4:30, so we wrapped it up and I sent my employee home. My dad quit around 2pm because his back hurt. Ostensibly he went down for lunch but I told him not to come back up the hill afterwards. It was a nice day for tapping because I could wear two hoodies and not be too cold working. Hitting the balance of enough clothes to be warm for several hours, but not too warm for climbing the mountain is really hard especially because the walk up is so intense. So you get sweaty walking up the hill, shed layers, start the work and then cool down. Because it is so stop and start, it is really easy to get cold, especially since the sun only hits the mountainside for a few hours and only at certain times of day. The key is not to shed the layers, just be sweaty for a few minutes after the walk, it'll even out. Or we just get cold.
The sap was running, but it made for easy tapping and diagnosis because the sap helped get the wood chips out of the hole and if it wasn’t running, that meant the tree was dead and should be flagged to get the taps removed from that section. I got a little thirsty on the mountain, but not too bad. The cold usually makes me thirstier, so this time I just drank a little sap from trees as I worked, enough to moisten my mouth. The sap is perfectly fine to drink, it is noticeably sweet from the tree.
Sunday I slept in. I was full body sore and tired although at a low level, not super intense. The temperature dropped dramatically overnight and it even snowed a bit. I went and split more firewood for a couple hours in the morning since there’s still so much on the ground. After lunch, I went on the hill and finished the last three lines. Not too bad at all but the wind was intense, so my face was cold. The sap was kinda running because it was just over freezing and sunny but only a little bit, so I could tap and the trees would run a little, but it wasn’t enough warmth to melt the sap in the pipes, so nothing was actually going anywhere. It will all freeze up solid tonight with the cold and we should get a magnificent sap run later this week. The trees like it best when the days are in the 40s and the nights are in the 20s and sap will run until the trees begin to bud. So boiling later this week some time.
After I got off the hill, I found out that two of the neighbor kids had been up on the mountain behind the house (not the one I was on) and accidentally set it on fire a bit. It’s fine, my dad saw the smoke, went up to help them and then called 911 about it. About an acre burned, partially on the neighbor’s property, partially on ours. Main reason my dad called is because some stumps and dead trees had caught and they couldn’t put them out by hand. The wind and sun had dried things right out so things caught quick. But it’s fine in the end.
I went to pottery class two Wed and Thurs night because I could and also I wanted to get as much practice in before we were done. And played video games with Jade. And ate 3 boxes of girl scout cookies to fuel me.
anyway, I'm doing absolutely nothing tomorrow and possibly tuesday
This became The Big Push to Get Shit Done for Maple Syrup. My whole body is sore. Wednesday was my first day on the mountain this week, replacing drops. We do maple syrup on a small/medium scale by tubes, around 600 taps. Smaller or more old fashioned producers do spouts and buckets where the buckets hang from the spouts or at the bottom of trees but that works best on flatter ground accessible by vehicle or horse drawn sleds. They also need to be emptied every day. We have a small mountain.
It is still a mountain. Actually, I think technically it is a ridge at the top of it, which isn’t where we are working, it’s further up and to the right of the below photo where my uncle’s orchard is. I don’t have a good sense of how high it is. In the view, we go up to the top of what is visible straight ahead and a little to the right.
We cross the creek over the extremely interesting bridge my dad has (a trailer frame with boards bolted to it. It used to be three sagging logs held together by boards, so I’m thrilled with this development), then either go left or right depending on which end of the lines we’re working on. This is about 700ft linear up to the first main collection line using the old logging trails. I have done some eyeballing of topo maps and such and it appears to be around 200 feet in elevation which is a 30% slope. This is not the steepest area of the mountain we climb for the maple syrup. And it is only to the first main collection line. It’s probably another 50-75 feet in elevation to the second main line and another 100 or 150 to the top of the ridge.
The interesting thing about physics is that if you have more than some amount of slope in your tubing lines, it will actually create a vacuum and suck the sap out of the trees and increase yield. It’s super cool. If you don’t have the elevation, you do boring things like put pumps on the lines.
We do big 1 inch lines as our main lines, two of those run down the mountain and converge to the pipe that crosses the creek. The 3/8 inch lines run off the main lines, around 22 smaller lines per main line. Each of these small lines has 3 to 23 taps on a line wiggling back and forth across the mountain to hit the maple trees. Larger trees can have more than one tap. Minimum size tree is around 12inch diameter to get one tap.
In this beautiful drawing below, I have demonstrated how this looks on the mountain. The two main lines we have run along the face of the mountain, so somewhat level in elevation with a slight downward elevation to the line that runs down the hill. The tapping lines run back and forth along the uphill slope around the trees which are the brown dots in the drawing so the trees hold the lines taut and off the ground. If the line were on the ground, it could cause issues with dips in the line accumulating gross stuff and makes it more likely that the squirrels will bite them.
The taps are connected to their 3/8 inch lines by what we call drops. They are a 24 inch tube with a t on one end connects to main line) and the spout (part that goes in the tree). The lines get gross year to year and we can flush cleaner into the lines, but we can’t flush the drops because they are designed that the sap goes in the spout and down into the line. So it’s hard to get it to work against gravity. And vacuum. So we replace half the drops each year.
Replacing the drops is a lot of standing and carrying a boat load of supplies. Also is a good time to fix issues on the lines. A huge problem, no joke, is animals biting the lines to get at the sap. Squirrels and bears are the biggest culprits. But also tree branches come down, etc.
Geared up for drops
Wednesday, I headed up the hill to do drop replacement. My dad taught me how to do it using this nifty tool. I have uploaded a video onto youtube here which is a simple, easy replacement of a drop. Since the t is in the line, I clamp the tool onto either side of the line beyond the previous t, cut both sides of it, ream out older tubes so they expand enough to fit the t, carefully place the new t into the lines, guide it into the tubes and once it will go in properly, press it closed so the tubes stay on the t. This really requires three hands to do, so I brace one handle of the tool on my bicep and curl that hand around to the other handle. The main issue is that the older tube has either stretched and tightened up or is just not as wide as the newer tubing, so it is really easy to catch the inner tube and crimp some of it into the interior of the tube which will clog the line. So it requires putting pressure on the handles while guiding the t into the tubes just so. An easy one will take me around two minutes. Difficult ones can be up to 15 minutes. Here is a video of that. You get a great look at the condition of my work coat.
If the clamps are too loose, the lines will slip out of the tool and then you must trudge down several trees worth and climb back up holding tension. It sucks. Sometimes the lines stretch and get narrower so adjusting the clamps on the go is necessary. Sometimes the old t’s are too close together or there is an issue with the tubing. Then we use these cool tools that look like E’s with rope between them to hook the lines together to maintain tension on the tubes.
I did this all day, taking lunch break around noon. I do leave the mountain for lunch because it’s cold and wet on the hill. The snow still hasn’t fully melted off the mountain as of writing this part friday evening because of the north facing slope. In fact, I’ve found areas where the previous snow storm (the 18 inches from beginning of Jan) is still present.
Some pictures of the mountain
This video was taken at the top of the mountain, at the top of the second main line's tapping lines. The flatter area at the start of the video is the edge of our property line.
Honestly, it’s so much fun on the mountain. It’s so hard. But it’s quiet, the work is satisfying and it’s a physical challenge. I got done 2/3 of the drops done on Wed.
Thursday, my dad had to finish making the rest of the drops, so I waited a bit to get back on the mountain until they were done. It takes probably 15 minutes to do the walk up to the first maple line, so it is really worth it to wait for supplies and take everything up at once.
I struggled with some of the lines Thursday, they were awfully behaved. But! I did get them all done. Lunch was at 2pm. It doesn’t make sense to stop in the middle of a line or on the way up, so once I was on a line, I wanted to finish it and work one back down. But not all the lines are the same length, some are quite long, so deciding to do two more can take over an hour. Thankfully the last few lines went quickly and I was able to get all the drops done that afternoon.
For the other half of the lines, we just were replacing the spouts, using last year’s drops (unless they are gross), so I finished that off Friday morning. My dad and one of the employees had done most of that, but I focused on the second line’s steepest section. It is so steep that sometimes it is easier to crawl up or slide down on my butt or sitting sideways even with the crampons. In some spots, it is probably a 45% slope by my eyeball. It’s so steep. I finished those lines and broke for early lunch.
After lunch, I start tapping trees! My dad was out finishing line fixing and replacing gross drops, but he started on the first line and I came behind.
Tapping is quite easy once all the prep work is done. I carry a drill, a hammer, wire for cleaning the hole, extra battery and a snack. I usually leave my water bottle near the main line and break for it once or twice a tapping session but not always.
Procedure for tapping is: find last year’s tapping hole (marked with spray paint when it got pulled), go over two inches and up or down six inches depending on what the drop reaches. Level drill, then tilt just a smidge so the hole will be slightly downward, drill hole to spacer on drill bit, use wire to clean wood bits out of hole, grab spout, tap spout into tree with hammer. Trudge to next tree and repeat. Can’t hit the spout too hard or you can split the hole (did that at first, oops). Video here.
I got 14 of 22 lines done on the first line, but the first 10 of them were shorter, so I just checked the tap records and I’m around 109 taps into our 644 total, so not too bad.
Saturday, we had an employee come and also my dad, so a crew of three on the mountain. We tapped all day and got almost all of it done! There was three shorter lines left when it was around 4:30, so we wrapped it up and I sent my employee home. My dad quit around 2pm because his back hurt. Ostensibly he went down for lunch but I told him not to come back up the hill afterwards. It was a nice day for tapping because I could wear two hoodies and not be too cold working. Hitting the balance of enough clothes to be warm for several hours, but not too warm for climbing the mountain is really hard especially because the walk up is so intense. So you get sweaty walking up the hill, shed layers, start the work and then cool down. Because it is so stop and start, it is really easy to get cold, especially since the sun only hits the mountainside for a few hours and only at certain times of day. The key is not to shed the layers, just be sweaty for a few minutes after the walk, it'll even out. Or we just get cold.
The sap was running, but it made for easy tapping and diagnosis because the sap helped get the wood chips out of the hole and if it wasn’t running, that meant the tree was dead and should be flagged to get the taps removed from that section. I got a little thirsty on the mountain, but not too bad. The cold usually makes me thirstier, so this time I just drank a little sap from trees as I worked, enough to moisten my mouth. The sap is perfectly fine to drink, it is noticeably sweet from the tree.
Sunday I slept in. I was full body sore and tired although at a low level, not super intense. The temperature dropped dramatically overnight and it even snowed a bit. I went and split more firewood for a couple hours in the morning since there’s still so much on the ground. After lunch, I went on the hill and finished the last three lines. Not too bad at all but the wind was intense, so my face was cold. The sap was kinda running because it was just over freezing and sunny but only a little bit, so I could tap and the trees would run a little, but it wasn’t enough warmth to melt the sap in the pipes, so nothing was actually going anywhere. It will all freeze up solid tonight with the cold and we should get a magnificent sap run later this week. The trees like it best when the days are in the 40s and the nights are in the 20s and sap will run until the trees begin to bud. So boiling later this week some time.
After I got off the hill, I found out that two of the neighbor kids had been up on the mountain behind the house (not the one I was on) and accidentally set it on fire a bit. It’s fine, my dad saw the smoke, went up to help them and then called 911 about it. About an acre burned, partially on the neighbor’s property, partially on ours. Main reason my dad called is because some stumps and dead trees had caught and they couldn’t put them out by hand. The wind and sun had dried things right out so things caught quick. But it’s fine in the end.
I went to pottery class two Wed and Thurs night because I could and also I wanted to get as much practice in before we were done. And played video games with Jade. And ate 3 boxes of girl scout cookies to fuel me.
anyway, I'm doing absolutely nothing tomorrow and possibly tuesday
no subject
Date: 2026-03-02 02:55 am (UTC)I know someone who made syrup from other trees and who wanted to sell it at the farmer's market. That didn't work out due to some arcane law about non-maple syrups that made it financially not worth it. (Can't recall the details of that.)
Thanks for all your posts.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-02 01:22 pm (UTC)Yes, other syrups! I think that is more common in European countries where they don't have sugar maples, but I've never done it myself. But I can imagine it falls into a place in regulations where they might not have updated it for a hundred years because no one does it anymore.
I'm glad you're enjoying the posts!