Northeast Ohioans are getting sappy this maple sugaring season at the Cleveland Metroparks.
The season takes place in the brief window of time just before spring when the freeze-thaw cycle of cold nights and warmer days creates pressure changes in sugar maples that force sap to flow out of trees tapped with metal spiles.
"What's happening is in the fall, the tree is photosynthesizing, and it's collecting all of the nutrients, and it stores it in its roots," said Lys Ursem, a naturalist at Cleveland Metroparks. "Once springtime comes and it recognizes that warmer weather, it says, 'Okay, it's time to make leaves. Let's send that sugar up to the leaves.' So what we're seeing is that sap, which contains all that sugar, transferring from the bottom of the tree to the top of the tree. And all we do when we tap that hole and we put the spile in is we're catching it in the middle."
Ursem is one of the naturalists who helps run the annual maple sugaring event at the Rocky River Reservation Maple Grove picnic area.
The annual event — hosted over two weekends — brings Northeast Ohioans up close to the maple syrup production process from collection through cooking.
In the Rocky River Reservation's Maple Grove Picnic Area, Ursem weaved through the sugar bush, a forest densely populated by sugar maple trees, checking the buckets hanging off the bark. Earlier this month, naturalists like Ursem drilled holes into about 70 nearby maple trees.
Once they fill with sap, it's cooking time in the sugar house: a sweet-smelling, three-sided shed with a chimney, where the sap is cooked down to boil off excess water in a machine called an evaporator.
"In general, sugar maples are anywhere between 2 and 3% sugar, which means that in order to make syrup, which is about 66% syrup, we have to cook off most of that water," Ursem said.
That means it takes 40 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup.
In the evaporator, the sap roils in pans heated by a fire below. As the water cooks off, it moves through a series of chambers.
"You'll be able to notice that in the back, it is really, really sloshy and clear. And while in the front, it's that more thick, viscous maple syrup that we are used to," Ursem said as she pointed to the bubbling liquid.
Once the syrup is filtered, it will be cooked a second time before it’s bottled.
"So that is why this process takes so long and oftentimes can be so expensive and different just because it takes so much effort," Ursem said.
Indigenous people had been tapping trees and collecting sap long before European colonization. But unfortunately, Ursem said there isn’t much of a written record of the prehistoric Woodland people who lived in this area, so the Metroparks’s educational program mostly focuses on the process used by early American pioneers.
"Especially if you were somebody who lived a more nomadic lifestyle and you moved around, you didn't want to carry jugs of water or syrup with you because it's incredibly heavy," Ursem said.
Pioneers would’ve tapped the trees using a hand drill and heated the sap in cast iron over a fire, as demonstrated at the Metroparks event. But pioneers would often take the lengthy cooking process a step further, continuing to cook off water until the sap became not syrup, but a rock.
"That hard rock sugar is how they would have carried it around, and they would have maybe grated or cut off pieces as they cooked throughout the year," Ursem said. "This would have been their only sugar source."
Today, a similar process is used to make maple candies like the ones available for purchase at the event.
The two-weekend event is very popular: Ursem said hundreds come for the self-guided walk through the sugar bush, the cooking demonstration and of course — the silver dollar pancakes with syrup made on site.
"So this small ephemeral event, I think, reminds people that spring is coming, but it can become a tradition that they can come out and eat and do the same thing every year and continue to see their family grow as they do it."
The event runs March 8 and 9 from 11 to 4 p.m. at Rocky River Reservation's Maple Grove Picnic Area. More details here.
