SYRUP

Let's see, we boiled on the 18th. Kelly had to work a fire on the 20th, so I did all the boiling. We boiled a third time on the 25th. The dogs were ever-present and ever-helpful...

By nightfall on the 20th, the stove had filled up with ashes, so I shoveled them and a bunch of coals out, and threw them on the snow. Looked a bit like pictures of the Iceland volcano...

We wound up with two large pots of almost-syrup in the freezer and one more in the fridge...

The freezer pots turned to slush. It was delicious...

We finished them on the kitchen stove Friday afternoon. The first and third batches were dark red...

And the second batch was orange...

I don't remember that happening in the past. Could be a whole bunch of reasons... Which trees the sap came from, the amount of sugar in the sap, the weather (temperature, clouds and sun, wind, air pressure), the temperature and length of boiling. We ended up with a pint more than two gallons.

WATERFALLS

Yesterday, we went up to Black River to see the waterfalls. They were really running with all the snow melting off...

That's just a drain pipe under a walkway. This is Great Conglomerate Falls...

Potawatomi Falls...

That picture is from an overlook right at the falls. Here's one from down river...

Gorge Falls...

And all those roiling waterfalls empty out into Lake Superior...

There were another two waterfalls we didn't see... The rain was going to start soon, so we headed home.