Mar 03 2018

Good Skiing Today!

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Hooray for a great ski day.

Open,  26º at 7am. Forecast high 35º. New snow, 7.5 inches.

Ian is out grooming. And the skiing will be really good. The snow fell pretty darn wet, but dried out nicely overnight. Ian is grooming the Turkey, Woodcock, Snow Goose, Grouse, Goshawk and Lower Blue Jay first. Then will get  to the Upper and Middle Blue Jay. The Chickadee is just too darn wet. (Those wet spots are  part of our summer trail work plan!) AND remember your Maxiglide. (We do have some here for sale). It is needed on waxless skis with new snow around freezing. 

Loving the new rig.

We continued boiling yesterday. We have now made 10.5 gallons of syrup. Get yours while it is still hot. We have been only filling glass jars (I refuse to put 200º syrup into plastic). Next time we boil we will put some syrup into cans. We have around 300 taps up and are now out of sap. So a little warm weather and we will be boiling again.

 

Mar 02 2018

March Comes In Like a Lion

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Nice, new tracks today.

Open, 30º at 7am. Forecast high 35º. And it is snowing outside.

Heavy, wet, thick snow. 4 inches so far. Ian is grooming this morning. He will groom the “lower” 10 km for today. You can ski the rest, as back country skiing. It will just be more work. This is the kind of snow waxless skis are made for, and you need to “treat” those waxless skis. We use Maxiglide. There are a couple of other products out there. Once I didn’t have Maxiglide and needed it and thought hand lotion or lip balm probably would have worked. What about olive oil if you have nothing else. Chuck thinks all my other Yankee options are a joke. But….

Over the last 2 days the sugar operation has come together. 

New rig getting up to full speed Thursday afternoon.

The foundation under the arch is new and different. The evaporator is staying level so far. The contraption on top of the back pan is a pre-heater and steam hood. The pre-heater takes the sap from 33º to 160º before it hits the evaporator pans to start making it’s way around to come out as syrup. And the temperature of syrup is 217º. The pre-heater uses the steam created from the evaporator pans to pre-heat the sap. The condensation from that steam then collects and runs thru a hose into buckets and we have hot water for cleaning up. This rig also now sports a fancy new blower, not seen in the picture. The blower uses the wood more efficiently and burns hotter. A win/win all the way around. We have new syrup. We made almost 6 gallons yesterday and we will be boiling again by this afternoon.

 

 

Mar 01 2018

Another Spring Ski Day, and Then March Comes In Like a Lion

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Ben having fun, flying thru the air!

Open, 37º at 7am. Forecast high 44º. And snow in the forecast for Friday. 

Skiing today is, again, spring skiing at it’s finest. Nothing out there you can’t ski over or around. Sounds like there will less sun this morning, and a little more sun this afternoon.

And the forecast, so far for us, unless the storm moves some other way, is 4-8 inches of snow according the National Weather Service Winter Storm Watch, with localized amounts up to 10 inches are possible. Another round of snow, another weeks worth of skiing. So goes the year.

The picture above is our friend, Ben. He was here yesterday with the Stratton Mountain School Nordic Team. After they do their “serious”, long ski, which still looks like lots of fun. The guys gather and start jumping. They need speed and they love to go high. We were having yoga in the studio and we did stop to watch and enjoy the kids flying not only thru the air, but skiing up and down the hill. One of the things we enjoyed most about watching these guys was the amount of joy they exude while skiing. We did wonder if they saw the same amount of joy from us in our yoga class. I am still wondering. Where do you find your joy? Is the joy palpable to others? Or maybe you just feel it inside. 

Feb 28 2018

Spring Skiing at It’s Best

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Three of the young fellas from Tuesday’s JISP program.

Nothing you can’t ski over or around.

Open, 32º at 7am. Forecast high 50º. Faster in the morning. Faster in the shade, slower in the sun and later in the morning.

The track of the Thursday/Friday storm, at this moment, is farther south. The total snow forecast, right this moment, is 1-4 inches, as close as I can guess. (I was going to say figure, but really it is guess.)

The picture above is from yesterday, Tuesday, the 27th. The three kids in the picture had skied a few laps, one of them being the Grouse. After this picture, they found the jump on the hill and like boys, were up and down the hil, over and over and over. Kids love to jump, this jump was already built, but a shovel is always close by and some young engineer type is always rebuilding and shoveling to make it bigger, a slightly different shape, or a different angle. This can keep young male children busy for hours. I am not being sexist here, just an observation. Young girls might go off the jump, they just don’t seem quite interested enough to stay and go up and down hour after hour after hour.

The buckets are hung. The evaporator is almost ready to go. Still have to put up the steam hood stack, and the smoke stack. The new line is hung, but not tapped, Sap is collecting the buckets and the back tank.  It will all come together today and we will be boiling by late this afternoon. Ahhh, the smell of maple, nothing quite like it.

 

 

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