Let the Goo Times Roll

For a taste of maple syrup and traditional culture, follow the snowshoes into the woods.

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The Sweet Science
Syrup production isn't solely the dominion of Vermont. New York, Maine and Quebec, Canada can all lay claim to being sweet spots for travelers.

A wolf runs to my car door as I park between a sugar shack and a lumberjack-style building at the end of a wooded country lane, about 45 minutes outside Quebec City.

Its teeth seem to be bared in a smile, but maybe it's a snarl. As I debate whether to get out of the car, a huge man with a long beard appears, wearing knickers, a puffy shirt and suspenders -- clothing that only adds to his striking resemblance to Paul Bunyan.

"Not to worry, that's just Lulu," he says with a heavy French Canadian accent. Actually, Pierre Faucher is saying Loup-Loup, meaning Wolf-Wolf in French, but it sounds like Lulu. And she's only 80 percent wolf. The rest is Siberian husky.

Loup-Loup greets thousands of customers each year here at La Cabane a Pierre, and at Faucher's other property, Sucrerie de la Montagne, just outside Montreal. Both properties are dual-purpose, producing maple sugar and preserving French Canadian traditions from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Visitors from around the world come all year to tour the maple groves, to dance to French Canadian music, to learn to play the spoons and to eat a hearty French Canadian country meal, parts of it doused in syrup.

This month and next, though, are prime time. It's sugar-shack season. Maple trees are tapped, sap drips into buckets that are then collected on sleighs pulled by Belgian horses, and wood fires blaze to reduce the thin, watery sap into a sweet amber liquid.

Faucher won't begin tapping his trees until tomorrow; he always waits "until the decline of the moon of March." But that first step in the sugaring process is already well underway in the United States' four top maple-sugar states: Vermont, Maine, New York and New Hampshire, in that order.

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It's been a weird winter for many of the maple producers in those states. The snow, instead of steadily falling and forming frozen layers, has come in major spurts in many areas. Over Valentine's Day weekend, for example, parts of Vermont got five feet of snow in 24 hours.

For the men and women who rise early to strap on snowshoes and head into the frozen forests to pound taps into maple trees, the odd weather has meant they've been slogging through snow up to their knees. Without snowshoes, they would sink to their armpits, says Jacques Couture, president of the Vermont Maple Foundation. This makes the work twice as hard, and a worker who can normally drive 750 taps a day is accomplishing half that.

But any day now, if it hasn't already, the sap will begin to drip. Producers eager to get customers hooked on their product will open their doors for tours. Most will add special events, such as a fiddler band, pancake-eating contests, petting zoos, sleigh rides and, almost always, free samples of hot, sweet and often gooey treats.

All sell maple syrup, maple sugar, maple candy and whatever else they can think of that uses syrup as an ingredient. Many also stock their stores with whatever they produce outside sugaring season, which generally runs from March to mid- or late April. Thus you might find cedar furniture, cane chairs or refinished antiques. Or a chance to pet an alpaca, then buy a sweater made from its wool, or pet a lamb and buy a sheepskin.

Although touring sugar shacks is an old tradition, akin to touring wineries or visiting pumpkin patches in the fall, it has been growing ever more popular. In New York state alone, sugar shacks logged 2 million visitors during two maple sugar weekends last year, said Mary Jeanne Packer, executive director of the New York State Maple Producers Association.