This week’s submission to Norm 2.0‘s Thursday Doors.

Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favourite door photos from around the world.

“Abandoned”

This image is a far departure from my usual images of stately, ornate doors, yet they are still doors and I found them quite intriguing.

As I was out hiking earlier this year, I came across an abandoned maple sap evaporator, sitting in the middle of a mature forest. It seemed so out-of-place that I had to make a photo of it to show to friends and thought Thursday Doors might be another place to share it.

For those unfamiliar with maple syrup production, the ‘sap’, which is a sweet, watery liquid produced by Sugar Maple trees, is gathered, either in buckets attached to the trees or, for more modern facilities, via a ‘pipeline’ of plastic hoses, and boiled down in an ‘evaporator’, like this one (but not full of holes). A large fire is kept going under the evaporator to boil off most of the water in the maple sap. The remaining syrup, is then further boiled in a smaller finishing tank. At the end of the process, the maple syrup, is about 1/40th the volume of the original sap. So, it takes a lot of sap to produce even a small amount of syrup. This boiling process occurs late February to early March, just as days begin to warm and the sap rises into the tree, which requires cold nights and days above freezing. The cycle usually runs for just over a week.

So, I look at this image and can imagine someone, in days gone by, harvesting the sap and boiling it here in the forest. The tank would likely have been covered or enclosed in a large ‘sugar shack’ to protect the producer from the elements and keep foreign matter from surrounding trees from falling into the evaporator.

Nikon D800
Tamron SP AF 90mm f/2.8 Di Macro 1:1 (272ENII)@90mm
1/50 sec, f/10.0 ISO 200

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