Around here (western NY), it seems like every time someone claims to have some "Hard Maple", it turns out to be silver. I've learned this the hard way (no pun intended), and now that I've got a year of scavenging under my belt, I'm realizing that most of the maple I picked up last year was of the softer variety. Just last week, I responded to a Craigslist ad for "hard maple", only to find fifteen feet of silver log on the ground in this guy's back yard. I took it anyways (one good thing about silver is it splits nice with the Fiskars if the hydraulic is down), but I'm still looking for my first haul of the elusive hard/sugar maple. I got some norway maple a few weeks ago and that seemed a bit harder than the silver, but how about posting some pics comparing maple (silver, norway,red, swamp, whatever you want to call it) with MAPLE? Call it a maple primer for newbies.