NEW SCOTLAND — In the midst of the pandemic shutdown, in early 2020, two old friends were hiking at the base of the escarpment on acreage owned by the Heldeberg Workshop.

As they walked among a stand of maple trees, Justin Perry said, “I want a sugarbush here some day.”

Chris Albright didn’t miss a beat. He responded, “I can work with you.”

The forester and the carpenter joined forces and the workshop will hold its first open house of the sugar shack on March 16.

“He was the brains,” Perry said of Albright as he led a visitor on a late winter day through the process of building the sugar shack. “I was the brawn.”

Perry, who grew up in Voorheesville, spent much of his boyhood hiking in the Helderbergs. Albright grew up at the base of the escarpment and lives there still.

“I always loved the woods. I love everything about trees,” said Perry.

He went to Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks to become an “educated logger” and then went on to get a bachelor’s degree from Colorado State.

Perry now works for the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation as the bureau chief of Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health.

Although Perry describes himself as a bureaucrat, at 51, he hasn’t forgotten his boyhood love of trees. He serves on the board of the Heldeberg Workshop, which runs summer programs for kids, and describes it as “an educational facility.”

“I wanted to show kids that cutting a tree down is not all bad,” he said. “You can get something out of a forest without destroying the forest.”

In January 2021, the workshop board approved the project, unlike any it had taken on before. “We dropped the first tree in February 2021,” said Perry.

Perry owns and runs a portable sawmill.

As he walks the snow-covered land, he points out places where he cut trees to build the sugar shack. He points to the ragged red bark of the Scotch pine, identifying it with its Latin name, Pinus sylvestris. Then he points to Norway spruce, Picea abies, with its large, long cones.

Both species came from Europe and were planted in the early 20th Century. He explains that, although they are not native species, neither are they considered invasive.

Invasive species, Perry explains, are able to “take off” because there are no natural controls to stop their spread. Ninety percent of exotic plants, he said, don’t have prolific seeds and don’t take over.

Invasives can be controlled by mechanical means, like cutting them or pulling them up. Sometimes chemicals are used, which Perry described as “very controversial.” Introducing natural predators is another technique being used to control invasives.

He gestured to an old stone wall running behind the Scotch pine and spruce trees before a stand of hemlocks, indicating the land was once farmed.

Before he felled the trees to build the sugar shack, Perry took a core sample to count the rings, determining the age of the tree. He also saved a “cookie,” that is, a slice of one of the felled trees, that he plans to hang in the sugar shack so visitors can count the rings themselves.

Not far from the site where Perry cut the trees, he set up his Hud-Son sawmill. He de-barked each of the logs to keep the blade from getting dull. A Thin Kerf blade still hangs on a tree near where the portable mill did its work.

The lumber was milled into hefty squared-off timbers to serve as posts and beams for the sugar shack as well as into planed boards to serve as siding.

The sugar shack was built by Albright at the foot of a hillside dotted with 90 or so maple trees. “They were not planted,” said Perry of the maples, which range in age from 40 to 140 years, he estimated.

Maples, he explained, plant themselves.

Albright, who is well versed in local history, said he taught himself how to do timber-framing, a building method that has been used for thousands of years. Squared-off timbers are joined with joints secured by wooden pegs.

“I’m really into history and this is traditional,” said Albright, who is retired from his career as an air traffic controller.

Albright has built a large addition to his timber-framed home as well as barns and sheds using the post-and-beam method. He had served as president of the Dutch Barn Preservation society.

The sugar shack has a deck out front (the only place store-bought pressure-treated lumber was used) with a peaked roof, topped by a cupola that opens to let the steam from sugar-making escape.

Coming up with a design for a building is the most challenging part, Albright said. He adapted the sugar shack design from a book by Jack Sobon, a timber framer in Massachusetts whom Albright described as his mentor.

“I’m pretty proud of it,” Albright said of the finished building.

W.F. Mason in Maine made the evaporator, which on March 16 will be filled with burning wood. Blue tubing runs through the maple grove, which carries the sap to a large plastic tank inside the sugar shack.

Typical of the cost-saving measures for the project, Perry said the tank holds water for the workshop in the summer but is being re-purposed for the springtime making of maple syrup.

Perry describes how the sap will flow from the tank, back and forth through the many channels of the evaporator. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.

“Native Americans did it in hollow logs,” he says of making maple syrup.

The fire will be fueled with ash wood, split and neatly stacked along one wall of the sugar shack. The fuel also came from Heldeberg Workshop land. Ash trees are dying in droves because of the invasive emerald ash borer.

“When it dies,” said Perry of an ash tree, “it becomes unstable very quickly. We have to cut it so it doesn’t fall.”

As he walks through the maple grove with his pitbull, Bean, never far behind him, Perry points out on a young sapling how the maple branches are opposite one another, much like a person’s arms.

“MADCap,” he says, recalling a mnemonic device from his days at Paul Smith’s. MADCapHorse is a way to remember that maple, ash, dogwood, caprifoliacae — which are shrubs like honeysuckle and viburnums — and horse chestnuts all have opposite branching patterns.

All the other northeastern trees, Perry explained, have alternate branching patterns. He holds up an oak stick with branching buds that, when you look down the stick, has a whirling pattern.

As he looks at the sugar shack, Perry says, “I hope the workshop never paints it.” He says the untreated pine and spruce will gray over time as a natural process.

Perry concludes, “This is all an experiment. We’ll have to make changes over the years on what works and what doesn’t.”

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The Heldeberg Workshop will hold its inaugural Community Maple Sugaring Festival on March 16, from noon to 3 p.m., welcoming visitors to watch how maple sap was traditionally harvested and concentrated. Festival attendees will also have opportunities to learn how to collect sap and make maple syrup at home, and to go on guided hikes. The workshop is located at 353 Picard Rd. in New Scotland.