Stay tuned for In Our Range on the way next, brought to you by Westgate Nursing Rehabilitation and Assisted Living Center.
Good morning and welcome to In Our Range.
My guests this morning are Roger Peterson, Summer and Charlene with the Northwoods Maple Program at Hurley High School.
The Northwoods Maple program began in 2019.
It is funded through the school district, the Hurley Education Foundation, as well as grants from Michigan State University, which helped them procure equipment.
Roger Peterson has taught woodworking at Hurley School since 2009.
He and Dan Rye began the program in 2019 with production starting in 2020.
The mission of Northwoods Maple is to provide students with the opportunity to be active in late spring, develop skills,
Bring a raw agricultural product to a finished product for market.
Students learn production, teamwork, and project management skills, as well as problem solving skills.
They are here to discuss the Northwoods Maple Program and Promote Maple Fest, which is happening this Saturday from 8 to 1pm at the Hurley School.
Good morning, you guys.
Morning.
Welcome to NR Range.
How are you doing?
Doing good.
Thank you.
So this program began in 2019 and it was grant funded and started.
What was the impetus for creating this program?
What prompted Roger, you and Dan to begin thinking about this as an educational experience for students early?
Dan had been making maple syrup with his children on a small scale for several years and invited me to get involved and
We just decided that maybe it was something we could offer our own students at the Hurley High School.
And so we took a couple of years to get everything together and for me to learn the process before we could allow the kids the opportunity at the Hurley High School to be exposed to the to the platform.
Excellent.
So
tapping maple trees and getting sugar from them is a tradition that's thousands of years old here on the Golgothic Range or on Lake Superior.
and lots of people involved in hobby and craft production for their families and then you guys saw the opportunity to promote that not only as an educational experience but something that could maybe expand opportunities for kids later down the road.
Just a hobby they can take home with them and throughout life they can apply it their own individual lifestyle in the future, teach their children something to keep passing on down the line.
And the program has grown quite a bit since 2019.
Yeah, so maple syrup is fun because you can have five trees in your backyard with five-year-olds and boil on a turkey cooker.
You can go to tens of thousands of taps and have elaborate setups that are hundreds of thousands of dollars.
We have approximately 300 trees tapped and our evaporator is 2 foot by 6 foot evaporator.
and the reverse osmosis were actually very efficient in our use of firewood, as well as time saved removing the water with the reverse osmosis.
Yeah, so
maple syrup, the actual sugar content of the water you get from a tree is about like two percent.
Two percent, yeah, two percent.
Two percent, yeah, two to three percent is usually what comes out of the tree.
When it's done being run through the reverse osmosis system,
it's about seven or eight percent.
Okay,
so it helps a little bit.
Yeah, so if we bring in 200 gallons of sap, we'll remove anywhere from 100 to 120 gallons of water, which our burn-off rate on the evaporator is about 15 gallons per hour.
So pull up and save 100 gallons of water boiling.
We end up saving probably six to eight hours a day boiling, so that much firewood and that much time, which with students,
Just the logistics of getting the kids out during the day and burning for eight to ten hours can be challenging.
So having that cushion of time with the reverse osmosis pulling off most of the water works out very well.
So anything you can do to cut back your time standing around that fire and getting exhausted is quite helpful.
Yes.
We're also joined by a couple students in the program, Summer and Charlene.
Welcome.
Thank you.
yeah how long have you guys been involved with the program
um i've been in the program for about two years now i've also been in the program for about two years now
okay and uh what grade did you start
i started in eighth grade
okay
i started in ninth grade
eighth and ninth grade and you're gonna continue this and through your senior year you think
yeah
what drew you to the program to begin with
um
We always went out there on field trips when we were in junior high with Mr. Rye all the time.
And then I thought, well, this is pretty cool.
And I wanted to start doing it.
So I came and talked to Pete and I got into it.
Excellent.
What's your favorite thing about maple syrup?
Probably just getting the experience to be able to do something like this, because it's just something new we can all learn.
So what drew you to the program, Sharon?
Just getting out of school and the experience as well.
Yeah, that's usually a primary motivator for high school students, right?
Is what gets me out of regular class and can be novel enough for me to enjoy.
And
then what do you end up getting out of it after that?
More experience and just it'll look good on like a resume or anything.
Yeah, what about the syrup?
That's pretty
good.
We get a bottle here and
there.
bottle here and
there.
Yeah.
Yeah, so you've got about 300 trees tapped and each tree, if I'm right, I think each tree can give depending on the size about 10 to 15 gallons of water.
Correct.
In a season.
So when you're done with the finished product, how about how many pints or quarts of syrup do you end up with?
10 gallons of sap is one quart of syrup.
So we usually figure approximately a quart or just shy of a quart per tree.
Okay.
So 300 trees, we should end up our own 250 to 300 quarts.
Last year, I think we finished with 70 gallons of syrup.
And besides Maple Fest, where I'm sure everyone gets to enjoy the fruits of this season's labor, what happens with all that maple syrup that you
collect?
The students actually go out to different marketing events like Lunday or Festival Italiano, and they'll sell maple syrup at those events.
They also sell directly
out of the high school shop.
People come to the school and request syrup and the students bring it down and make the sale.
So it's like a true tap to table experience from the beginning.
And so there's plenty of opportunities for kids to be met wherever their skill set is.
So at the beginning of the season, students sign up for which area they want to work in.
So some students just want to tap trees and be in the woods and slosh around in the snow and snowshoes.
other students just want to put wood in the fire and watch it boil down.
Some students specialize in the reverse osmosis.
Tomorrow we're actually going to be setting up our candy machine that the education foundation donated and they're going to make maple candy and then some students just put labels on and then sell the product, advertise and sell the product.
That's really great.
And so the sugar bush that you have, the grove of maple trees, is it just one site or you go
to?
Two sites.
Dan Ray has property, his property.
He has 125 taps.
And then on my property, I have about 200, 225 taps.
So here on the range, the maple trees are this amazing resource.
And then that 300 taps is on a total of about
probably 10 acres, maybe 10 acres, so a small tract of land can really provide opportunity for a lot of taps.
And for people who have done maple syrup collecting and cooking down, and for those who may not know, there's a million ways that this process can go.
What are the techniques and
means that you use to collect when you're tapping trees out there.
So we began with collecting individual trees and individual buckets and then walking around and collecting.
That process only allowed us to have about 80 taps.
So we, you know, with the manufacturing mindset, we actually
figured we could increase our productivity in our end product yield by increasing taps, but the only way to efficiently do that was to convert to gravity lines that the kids have.
There's probably 15 or 20 gravity lines that we have, all averaging 15 to 25 taps per line.
Yeah, so you can connect the taps from different trees together and then as these trees collectively pull out,
they actually can become more efficient at pulling.
It actually creates
a vacuum.
So we use natural vacuum.
We don't use an actual vacuum pump that some people do use effectively.
But with the gravity lines, you can achieve a certain level of vacuum naturally.
We've put gauges on the end of lines and just you can read the vacuum actually being created.
Wow.
So
physics.
So we also teach physics.
And that's what Dan Rice experienced being a science teacher.
He incorporates a lot of just the science aspect, how the sap flows through the trees, as well as any of the physics related stuff.
Yeah, there's endless science that happens
with people.
And even the chemistry of the sugar water itself, where I know that there are years where I was taught.
that I could pretty much chuck out any ice that's floating in the buckets, because it's less likely that there'll be sugar in that ice.
Is that real?
There is less sugar, but
we
try to scrap every last bit of sap that we can.
So yeah, we bring the ice in and process it all the same.
That's fair.
That brings me to a situation where it's also you get this opportunity for kids to really connect with nature, where springtime can be a really discouraging time of year, right?
but when you know that the trees are awake and you know that the sap is flowing it feels for me anyway a little bit encouraging to know okay whatever's happening weather wise spring is on its way.
So we try to plan days that we tap on days that we know what's going to run so we'll actually tap in the afternoons on 35 40 degree days just there's a satisfaction when the drill bit comes out it starts oozing sap
brings that little smile to your face knowing that that's my first sign of spring right there when the sap's coming out of the tree.
Yeah, it's an encouraging feeling.
So when you're boiling, when you're cooking down, what does that look like for the Northwoods Maple program?
The wood is provided.
I bring firewood from home and all prepped.
But then the students actually, they'll move a lot of the sap around.
They will pump the sap from the truck into the RO tank.
process it and then pump it up into a gravity tank up on our sap shack that gravity feeds the pans.
So they really don't have to add any sap to the pan individually.
It's monitored by a float box.
So they pretty much put wood in the fire and just maintain the highest heat they can get going in the fire box.
That's incredible to me that such
An old tradition can also be such a window to step, you know, to the latest in science and technology.
And that's, we have this discussion every year with sappers or special breed, because everybody learns how to do it on their own at home.
And you constantly adjust with what you have available to you in your shed or garage.
and you want to be as efficient as possible so whether it's coming up with a bucket as a warming box into a pan before this so you're not introducing cold sap into a pan preheating or there's a lot of little tricks like that that everybody just makes up as they go and make it make it as fun as they can for themselves.
So how many folks do you usually have around a boil as you're cooking it down?
It depends on on what stage
we're at so tomorrow is going to be we're firing up for this current run so it'll be the first fire so right now we're cleaning the pans and the students are running the RO right now bringing the sugar content up to that 8% so tomorrow they'll transfer the concentrate into the shack and then they'll flood the pans and start a fire and that first day the first day you don't get that sweet
sweet maple syrup smell in the shack, we call it sweetening the pan.
So
tomorrow they'll start sweetening the pan and then the second day that's when it starts to really smell like a maple syrup shack and you get the sweet maple syrup smell.
So there's usually three to four students in the shack taking turns firing the evaporator.
And is there no phones
policy due to
the...
till I turn my
back, I don't know.
Due to the dangers of distraction.
Yeah.
Well, they have a procedure with, we have a blower fan on the evaporator.
So they have a procedure they go through with shutting the blower off.
One person preps the firewood, another person puts welding gloves on and a face shield and a welding jacket.
And they open the door and they stack the wood.
They have a good process in place.
It makes it pretty efficient and safe for them.
Yeah, what an incredible opportunity and what wonderful toys you guys have to make the job easier.
So that'll bring me to the Saturday's event, Maple Fest, 2026.
How long have you been holding this event?
Last year is the first year.
Gary Pellkla and the Lions Club have been wanting to do something jointly.
Talk to us and we just...
put together a let's just pick a weekend and they're doing a pancake feed obviously with our maple syrup and then at the same time students will be running the maple operation and selling maple syrup both inside the building and out by the sap shack.
So there'll be demonstrations by the students themselves.
It'll be
full operation.
So you see everything.
Opportunities to get some delicious pancakes with some fresh local maple syrup and support an incredible program.
there at Hurley.
What are you most excited for, Charlene and Summer, when it comes to this Saturday's event?
Probably being able to show people the process, what we actually do, so they can actually see what happens when we're working there.
Okay, they know you're not just fooling around.
Yeah.
I
don't know, these adults do it for you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So yeah, I think we can end it there.
Everyone is welcome to head to the Hurley K-12 School on Saturday morning from 8am to 1pm for the second annual Maple Fest, 2026.
Adults are $10.
The event is sponsored by the Northwoods Maple Program and the Hurley Lions Club.
So head on over to the Hurley K-12 School on Saturday from 8am to 1pm.
Get some delicious pancakes, sausage, coffee, milk, and juice with some fresh maple syrup.
Show these kids how proud you are of them and support them.
Thank you Roger Peterson, Summer and Charlene for joining us on In Our Range this morning.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
My guests this morning were Roger Peterson and students Summer and Charlene from the Hurley K-12 School Northwoods Maple Program and they came here to discuss the program and also to promote the pancake breakfast happening this Saturday, April 11th from 8 a.m.
to 1 p.m.
Pancake breakfast will feature sausage, coffee, milk, and juice and some of that delicious freshly cooked down maple syrup that you can get.
Adults will be ten dollars and kids ten and under are five dollars.
That's eight to one over at the Hurley School.
Thank you for joining us this morning on In Our Range brought to you by Westgate Assisted Living.