First trip to "the mountain"
It was a full day of forestry. If only I had had a pair of snowshoes.
Although the snow is gone from the streets of Sapporo, it still lays pretty deep out in the forest -- or at least it did about two weeks when I accompanied the Mori Volunteers to the stand of municipal forest they manage on the outskirts of the city. They refer to this forest as "the mountain".
The first activity of the day was an adventure in orienteering as we set out as a group to double-check the accuracy of the Western property boundary with a GPS unit against an existing map and existing flagged trees. Everything checked out all right except my gear. I was the only one out of about 20 people without snowshoes and ended up with soaked pants and snow in my boats as I did the high step in and out of three-foot holes.
Next, we divided our group into two with the bulk of the volunteers heading out to various parts of the forest where trees had been previously felled and cut into manageable hunks. We loaded these pieces of wood onto handmade sleds, tied them down, and hauled them back to a large woodpile.
After a short stint at this labor, I passed on to the other group that was delineating a transect that would be used to gather data over the coming years of succession within the managed forest. I wondered why we were doing this with three feet of snow on the ground, and my answer from a retired Hokkaido University forestry professor was "why not?" Why not indeed!
Here's a shot of some of maple trees (I think) they have tapped for sap:
