On a warm May Monday, more than three dozen high school students took to the forest behind a former dairy barn at Vermont State University in Randolph.
In teams of four, they ran blue plastic tubing from tree to tree, racing to connect the tubes across three trees in 30 minutes. One student leaned back and pulled it taut with his body weight while another secured tube to tree. Quickly, they dashed to the next in what appears to be a twisted tug-of-war.
Another group panicked as water gushed from a bucket hanging from the side of a tree. If the students had run the lines correctly, sap (or in this case, water) should have flowed through the channel and streamed out the other end. But something wasn’t working for this second group; the water didn’t move.
“Try to figure out where there’s blockage!” Lynn Wolfe shouted from a few feet away. A farmer and an educator, Wolfe designed this event, the fifth-annual maple career day through the University of Vermont and the local environmental educator Shelburne Farms.
