June 13, 2024, Happy Hill Maple Farms, Lyndonville, VT
We’re on our way to visit Bill’s brother, Glen, in Sutton, VT. But he was pretty busy today so we decided to spend tonight at a Harvest Host near his home. Our route took us up and over the Kancamagus Highway. Our first stop, just a few miles above Covered Bridge, was at the Rocky Gorge area. It’s a short but pretty gorge section of the Swift River.
A short walk takes the visitor in to another bit of the Nanamocomuck that passes by Falls Pond. We noticed a large tadpole in the clear water and nearby a fat bullfrog who was quietly keeping an eye on us.
Hancock Overlook is at the top of the Kancamagus. It’s a beautiful vista and most people stop for the view. As Laconia Bike Week was still in full swing, the parking lot was full of bikers also taking in the view.
A few miles before our arrival we spotted an unusual sight, at least for us. We drove passed a marshy pond and there, in the middle of the pond, was a moose munching away. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to back up our rig with the car in tow so we didn’t get a picture. But we’re keeping the memory for sure!
Our Harvest Host for the night, Happy Hill Maple Farms, is a maple sugaring operation owned and run by Lisa & Karl Johnson and their son, Michael.
The farm was closed for the day when we arrived but we met and enjoyed talking to another couple who were also staying there. They are mountain bikers from the Montreal area and regularly come to the area to ride on the Kingdom Trails facility. Kingdom Trails is a highly regarded system boasting about 100 miles of trails. The bikers were traveling in a camper van that they had built themselves from a base Ford Transit van. Their biking needs were clearly a big priority in the van’s design. Two large aluminum framed drawers pulled out from the back of the van. Each contained one of their two high-end mountain bikes. An all aluminum kitchen was in another drawer between the bikes. Petty cool!
June 14, 2024, Glen Stine Home, Sutton, VT
The farm’s owners arrived about 8:00 AM and gave us a tour of their operation. Originated as a post-early-retirement idea twelve years ago, it ballooned into a full blown business that grew to 20,000 tapped trees! It turned out that was too many taps to operate and still have a life. So they downsized to 10,000 trees and are happy with that.
It’s a modern operation with two huge holding tanks inside the their facility. The sap flows directly into them from the taps, pulled by vacuum, through a huge tubing system that spans the mountainside.
It takes 40 gallons of sap to produce a single gallon of syrup. That means a lot of water has to be extracted from the sap. The bulk of the water is removed using a reverse osmosis unit. That concentrated sap then passes through a large, oil-fired, horizontal evaporator system that finishes the water removal process. The final syrup is stored in stainless steel barrels until packaging. On a busy day they can process nearly 15,000 gallons of sap!
Most of their product is sold in bottles through local retailers, their website or through retailers in Florida where Lisa & Karl winter. (Yeah, that keeps son, Michael, pretty busy during the winter.) Some of the syrup is converted into maple sugar candy. But their most special product is syrup that is aged for 6 months in bourbon or rum barrels which imparts a very tasty finish to the syrup. We purchased a bottle each of the barrel-aged varieties.
Afterwards we headed to Bill’s brother’s home in Sutton. We’re faithful navigation system users but today’s experience was less than satisfactory. Vermont has a very large number of dirt roads and we think we found most of them on the twelve mile drive to Glen’s house. To boot, one of the dirt roads it directed us on turned out to be a dead end! That might not have been too much of a problem except there was no way to turn our rig around. So, we unhitched the car, got each vehicle turned around and drove the last couple of miles separately.
After our arrival greetings we began to search for a place to dump our grey water. That’s the waste water collected from sink and shower drains. Bill had hoped Glen would have a sewer cleanout fitting into which we could dump. But his septic system is not so equipped. So we began calling nearby private campgrounds but none of them could accommodate either. That was due to a state regulation requiring the use of a special sewer dumping facility. Since these campgrounds had sewer connections at each campsite they had not installed a dump station. So they were not permitted to allow us to dump. We ended up driving nearly eighty miles round trip to New Discovery SP to use their dump station. Ugh!
Dinner out was at Estella’s Bar and Grill in nearby Lyndonville where we all settled on pasta choices that were delicious.