Tapping Week

March 11th through 17th

Last week had sun, rain, cold, less cold, ice, hope, and despair . All are part of the mixed bag that defines the third sub-season of Winter: Thaw. We especially liked the sun and less cold bits.

At the start of the week, vehicles, mailboxes, and dwellings were encased in a cocoon of cold white.

By mid week, the less cold and some rain brought about a great molting that exposed roofs and buried lawns and windows.

Was the word "rain" sprinkled into that last slide? Yes, yes it was. We got 0.4 inches of liquid snow around the middle of the week.

The bottle rocket war forts started the week as identifiable edifices and ended the week as artifacts detectable only with the use of complex snow forensic techniques.

With the thaw comes the sugary death march that has come to define the start of the northwoods maple tapping season.

Running around trees with snowshoes is slow and cumbersome. Sinking a non-snowshoed boot several feet into a seemingly packed trail is beyond slow and cumbersome. After extracting lower limbs from the deep, we all shooned up.

If the atv had wheels instead of feet, it would not have made it a yard on the trails.

By the weekend, 320 trees had spiles, buckets, and lids. Only 49 to go and those will be taken care of right after this update is posted.

There's currently some sap in them buckets. There will soon be much collecting, boiling. filtering, canning, and pancakes.

After the rain, there was a trace snow and a dollop of cold that caused snow devils to dance on the lake.

Despite the colder temperatures, paved roads are shedding their icy cover. The sides of the roads still have some snow.

The condition of Knott Lane is terrible. It's covered with about 3 inches of very slidey, contusion-y hard ice.

Olaf, the giant snowman between Laona and Wabeno, survived the rain. At this rate he might survive June.

Winter is not dead yet, but looking ahead all that's left of the icy season are cold mornings and large steaming piles of snow. And a little lake ice. We didn't get a chance to put a hole into the lake to measure it (made lots of holes in maple trees though). We'd guess it's about a yard thick. A bore hole will be made soon to check on that estimate. In the meantime, visit the newly redesigned ice-out page (the knottlane code monkeys are quite proud of it) and <a href="https://knottlane.com/iceout/IceOut2019.html" TARGET="_blank">pick a date (and maybe win money!)</a> Huzzah! <br><br>-Nemo's got 49 more holes to make.