What  a day.  Raining yet at 5:30 AM.  By 7:15 it turned to a wintery mix.  By 9:00 AM the temperature dropped just enough to give snow.   10 hours later its still snowing.   We also have a strong North wind giving us near blizzard conditions at times.  We’ve had a good 6” maybe more.  Through all of this we were preparing for and started cooking sap.

Started setting up the R/O.  Got the pipes up.  Then got a call from the location television station.  They wanted to come out to do a story.    They were here about 1 ½ hours.  Left at Noon.  We did get the evaporator fired up so the television station had something interesting.  Wanted to do that anyway to get a start on cooking.  With colder weather coming we wanted to get yesterday’s sap cooked.  That didn’t quite work out.

Spent all afternoon on the R/O.  Had to haul over water to prepare the membrane.  Had a 100 gallon tank for water but our hoses weren’t long enough to fill from the sink in the house.  Finally pieced together two hoses from the syrup building that we use with the pump.  Otherwise we would have to use buckets to fill the tank.  Trying to back trailer close to the building was also a challenge with the snow and soft ground under the snow.  At one point we dropped a screw driver into the water tank.  Had to take off outer shell, fleece liner and roll up shirt sleeves and reach into the water tank to  to fish out the screen driver.   Its mid-20s with a strong North wind and blowing snow and we’re standing outside with rolled up sleeves reaching into cold water.  You may get cold just reading that.

Got 100 gallons in the R/O water tank only to realize once again that water does not flow up hill.  Our new R/O water tank is too low.  We’ll need to block it up.

Now its 4:00 PM.  Snow and blowing hard.  Our hands have been warm, cold, wet, dry so many times today they don’t seem to register the differences any more.  Realized that our day of cooking with the R/O and then just cooking was a bust.  Its getting colder and we have to start thinking about how we keep the tanks from freezing.  We had one tank heater.  Picked up three more so three sap tanks and one water tank could have a heater.  The tank heaters arrived about 6:30 PM.  Got them inserted but we tripped one circuit breaker when we tried to connect two heaters on the same circuit.

Back to the house by 7:15 PM.  12 hours in the woods.  In a snow storm.  The things we do to make Maple Syrup.

Tomorrow and Friday are also cold but the weekend warms to the 50’s again.