(already subscribe? log in).

Snowshoes and maple at Morse Farm in Montpelier, Vt.

EXPLORE NEW ENGLAND

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 19, 2012|By Patricia Harris and David Lyon

Morse Farm has been a maple sugarworks since 1948 and is run by a family with… (David Lyon for the Boston…)

MONTPELIER, Vt. — Vermonters are a hearty lot. After a morning on the cross-country ski trails at Morse Farm, they line up at the snack bar where signs offer hearty bowls of chili and steaming cups of hot chocolate. But almost everyone — adults and children alike — opts instead for a swirled cone of maple creemee, as soft-serve ice cream mixed with maple syrup is called in these parts.

That is just one of the advantages of hitting the trails at this maple sugarworks established in 1948 and now run by father and son Burr and Tom Morse, the seventh and eighth generations of a family that began making maple syrup in Vermont around 1780. Burr, by the way, is often credited with introducing the maple creemee, though he modestly demurs that it was simply a matter of adjusting a standard recipe for soft-serve ice cream. “We do add a lot of maple syrup,’’ he says. He is also locally famous for his secret-recipe Maple Kettle Corn.

About 10 years ago, Burr decided to open up the property for winter recreation. Former Olympic skier and biathlete John Morton designed the trails to follow the gentle contours of the land across open pasture and into piney forest, sometimes even skirting the edges of the maple groves. The farm offers 15 miles of machine-groomed cross-country ski trails and 2.5 miles of back country snowshoe trails, some with views of Camels Hump and the Worcester Range, just south of Stowe.

On a bright but brisk Saturday morning in early February, Nordic skiers were out in force to take advantage of the thin layer of snow that had finally coated the trails in this virtually snow-free winter. We found slightly deeper cover when we chose instead to follow a snowshoe trail into the woods. Snowshoeing may lack the grace and speed of skiing, but we have come to appreciate the chance to survey the winter landscape at a slower pace. Except for a few bird calls and the crunch of our shoes breaking the crust beneath the overnight dusting, the woods were hushed.

We stopped often to study the variety of tracks that revealed little stories. A circular flurry showed where two chipmunks had chased each other around a tree, while the pointy toes and smoosh of snow between steps indicated a porcupine wending its way through the woods, dragging its tail behind it. Loping tracks of snowshoe hares were everywhere, and we occasionally crossed paths with tracks of deer looking for winter browse. Maybe the black bears of Vermont were hibernating, but all the other creatures were carrying on, even in the heart of winter.