Secrets of making syrup shared at park
PENN TWP — A sweet, syrup-like scent wafted across Succop Nature Park on Saturday. The aroma at times was maple-icious.
There were billows of smoke and crackles from a fire. Something strange was in the air.
The source of the sensory overload was the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania's eighth annual Maple Madness event where visitors stopped by to experience the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of maple sugaring.
The participants, many of them children, got a crash course on the history and art of maple sap tapping.
Slippery Rock University students served as tour guides in assisting Ryan Stauffer, the park naturalist, during the event.
“Everyone has a good time here being outdoors and learning about nature,” Stauffer. “I think being in the modern world with so much technology going on, we forget just how much nature can provide.”
Maple mavens taking the tour meandered through trails on the Succop Conservancy grounds, stopping at different stations along the way as part of their educational experience.
Manning the Native American station was SRU student Brittany Blumen, who explained that Native Americans were first to discover how to tap trees and produce syrup.
The natives would collect sap in hand-crafted bark vessels, and boil the sap with hot stones.
John Siwiak, another SRU student-volunteer, looked the part as he provided instruction at the pioneer station while dressed in garb fitting of an early American settler.“They used wooden pails to collect the sap,” he said, “which they boiled in large iron kettles hung over open fires.”For Siwiak, donning colonial attire Saturday was a far cry from his costume as a volunteer at the Audubon Society's educational Halloween event last fall at Succop Nature Park.“I was a lightning bug,” he said, cracking a smile.Tour-goers also got a look at metal collection buckets hung on trees, which replaced the wooden pails, as they moved onto the modern station.SRU student Ryan McClaren explained how the maple-tapping process has progressed to stringing hundreds of feet of translucent blue tubing that branches out like arteries from numerous trees at once.Gallons of sap flow through the “pipelines,” he said, into a large plastic collection tank, which eventually is delivered to the “sugar shack,” or sugarhouse.“The sap that's collected is then boiled down in an evaporator,” said SRU student Julia Rismiller, “and when it reaches the perfect temperature, it's drawn off, filtered and bottled.”During her instruction, Rismiller employed some of those devices — like a steam stack-fitted firebox and evaporator — used in honest-to-goodness sugar shacks.“It's always a fun event,” Stauffer said of Maple Madness, “and it's nice to see the children out with their parents and grandparents having a good time. I get a lot of pleasure from it, too.”At the end of the tour, participants were able to partake in a meal of pancakes and — what else — maple syrup.
