Tales of the Flowers: Fall Foliage in Vermont - Couture Maple Sugar House and Jay Peak

Today we've got a lot on our plate with lots of driving and lots of searching for beautiful Vermont fall leaves! We're in Vermont visiting our friends Jake and Pauline Couture who own a maple sugar house and Bed & Breakfast.

Never a slow moment here. Jake was up early packing new jugs of maple syrup for their store. They had a busy day yesterday with all the leaf peepers in the area. When you're the producer, you can't just order more maple syrup, you got to prepare it and pack it yourself!

Our bedroom above the maple kitchen smelled amazing. I'm definitely ready for some breakfast!

Mrs. Pauline had homemade pancakes, sausage, apple sauce, berries, coffee, and juice for us.

Afterwards, we all hopped in our cars and headed up the hill to the Maple Sugar House.

I'm sure Jake has given this tour hundreds or even thousands of times, but he always explains all the details with excitement and years and years of knowledge. This sugar house was built using lumber from their forests!

We learned a little bit about the maple forests themselves, how they need to be maintained all through the year. Trees and branches fall over due to wind or age. Sometimes trees are a little too crowded together and need to be thinned out for one of them to thrive. All that extra wood gets brought to the sugar house to stoke the furnace below the boiling pan. They've already been hard at work! You can see just a portion of the wood they've gathered in the photo that led off this post.

Inside the Maple Sugar House! Theresa, the kids, and I made it a special point to come out here earlier this year during the short 6 week maple sugaring season! It was steamy and warm and smelled amazing then.

Jake has closed everything up for the season, waiting to start again next year.

He walked us through the whole process of bringing in the sap from the trees, sending it through the reverse osmosis filter, then boiling off the remaining water until it's just the right amount to be maple syrup.

Seeing where all the maple sap is brought inside the sugar house.

Very cool!

That was fun!

For our next event of the day, we're all piling into the cars in search for more beautiful leaves! Instead of heading south though, we're headed north and west.

The Couture's Bed & Breakfast is very close to Jay Peak, a nearby ski resort, and they get a lot of skiers who stay with them each season.

Here we are! Not to ski, but to do something else.

There's a resort here with plenty of leaf peepers, but we're happy staying with our friends. I'm happy there was free parking for everyone visiting.

And here's what we came to see. The bright colorful hillsides!

But why stay down here when we can go up the mountain and get closer! We're going to take a tram ride to the top of Jay Peak!

Paying for the group at the store below.

Gram had her ID out for the senior discount. The worker said she didn't need it. Theresa said "She can see you're old." Oh boy.

Oh yes! This is looking great!

Wow!

That's what we're riding on!

Headed up the stairs to the gondola house.

That's where we're going!

Our lift.

They opened at 10am today and we just missed the first tram by 15 minutes. No worries though! Another one will be along in just a few minutes!

Us and lots of friends. We all squeezed into the tram for our ride up.

Some really bright and saturated trees here at the base.

I started singing "Sweet Caroline" as we went up the tram, just like when we were in Palm Springs going on the tram there. The kids jumped right in with the Bom Bom Bom portion.

And lots of colors we passed as we go up.

One of the facts that amazes me is that even with all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy (numbering in the 100-400 billion range), the trees on earth outnumber all those stars by a factor of 10! There's an estimated 3 trillion trees on planet earth!

Ian if there's 3 trillion trees, how many leaves do you think there are?

Thank you Theresa for planning this weekend! It's all working out great!

Made it to the top! We just traveled 1.5 miles, gaining 2000 feet in elevation!

At the top, it was a bit colder than at the bottom. Luckily cold weather hats and jackets were one of the things we packed and brought with us from Florida.

With everyone getting off the tram, we were amazing this little guy didn't get squished!

Ian picked him up and made sure to move his somewhere a little safer.

Gotta get a picture of everyone at the top!

Looking around, there's a lot more yellows on the hillsides here.

Of course we've got to get pictures of all the families.

There's regular trails, but there's also some rocks and boulders to scramble over.

We're not the only ones at the top. There's also the option of trail hiking to get to the peak! The trail takes you 3 miles through the trees and rocky grounds, and up 1600 feet of elevation. It can take 2-3 hours round trip, but Mickey was certainly interested in hiking if they come back again.

While the rest of the family headed back towards the lodge at the top of the mountain, some of us are wanting to explore a little more.

Alli, Ian, Dad, and I walked down the trail a little ways until Alli chose to scramble up the rocks and climb.

Lead on Alli! Whatever way you want to go!

We're missing gymnastics class in Florida today, but she'll still do some poses on the top of the mountain.

Time to get back down! We hustled back up the path to the lodge to make it in time to catch the tram back down. The rest of the group were early enough to even get seats!