An all-around beautiful day!

Lots of smiles on peoples' faces today as yesterday's big dump of snow melted away almost as fast as it came.  We still have lots of snow, but temps up in the upper 40's really compressed it down, as seen in my gauge:

We're almost back to the low of 29 1/2 inches from several days ago.

Because it looked so nice out this morning, we decided that if we were going to expand our maple syrup project for this year, today was the day.  We gathered (most of...see below) our materials, buckled on the snowshoes and started out for the sugar bush--where the maple trees are.  Since we've had 2-3 big snowstorms since the last time we went down there, we were breaking all new trails today.  And because I ended up in snow almost to my waist last time, we tried a different path, attempting to angle our way down.

And that worked pretty well, as long as I side-stepped my way down the hill, until I got to the bottom where it was flat.  We easily trekked over to where the trees were, and we sadly realized that we didn't have the little bucket of taps to go into the trees.  Darn!  And, as Leann stated (since it was kind of her deal to remember...), "Should have had a checklist!"  So, I went back up the hill and this time it was almost like a walk in the park!  I found the container of taps, hiked back down there and we now have a total of about 15 taps drip, drip, dripping into the cartons!

Around 5pm this afternoon, we went back over there to see what kind of action we've had today.  Our morning trail was NOT a walk in the park this afternoon because of all the snow melting/sinking/compressing that had happened today.  What were good solid trails underneath before are now getting soft and unpredictable. But I got down there and was able to collect about two gallons of sap there and another 2 gallons in the tree near our house.

So, time to cook tomorrow!