Late winter is maple sugaring season—and time for a connective tale to the sugarbush, its wondrous resource, and its industry.
Last July I was privileged to gather with my professional counterparts from other states for a 3-day meeting in Burlington, VT on the beautiful shore of Lake Champlain. After our business, I realized we were about an hour’s drive north to the headquarters of Leader Evaporator, the world’s leading manufacturer of sap boilers, evaporators and other maple syrup equipment and supplies. So I just had to go!
When I introduced myself as the author of Maple Sugar, a book they stock and sell through their catalog, my wife Carol and I were given a personal, hour-long tour of the manufacturing and welding bays. Our guide Fred also walked us down the road to show us a separate building where they manufacture the plastic tubing from tiny pellets on very long machines, and coil them up in huge spools.
We crossed over the top finger of Lake Champlain near the Quebec border, and headed back south with the lake on both sides of Rt. 2 to Grand Isle, where we took the ferry across to Plattsburg, NY. We overnighted in Lake Placid, toured the 1980 Winter Olympics arena, ski jump, and other facilities.
We then swung by Cornell University’s Uihlein Forest Maple Research Center and sugar shack. It wasn’t open, but we took a short trail walk near dusk in the extremely quiet sugarbush, where miles of tubing connects some 7000 sugar maple trees to annually produce about 100,000 gallons of syrup.
It was a sweet trip from start to finish!