It's time to collect maple sap

*FILE PHOTO*(NYT41) QUEBEC, Canada -- Feb. 3, 2009 -- QUEBEC-SUGAR-SHACK-ADV08-6 -- Sap being collected in buckets in Quebec in March 2008. Tapping sugar maples and boiling the sap might be one of winter's most enduring images. But it's one thing to glance at the tiny illustration that decorates almost every bottle of maple syrup (trees and snow, buckets and a cabin), and quite another to spend a frigid day visiting a Quebecois cabane a sucre, or sugar shack, and discover that it's all true: the snowy hills and horse-drawn sleigh, the buckets hanging from trees emptied by burly men with beards. Or at least that's the way it is at Sucrerie de la Montagne, a rustic compound of split-log cabins that's just a 45-minute drive from downtown Montreal but looks as though it could be from the 18th century. (Yannick Grandmont/The New York Times) (The Minnesota Star Tribune)