The sap is running on the North Shore and the folks at Sawtooth Mountain Maple Syrup are working hard to collect it. Above: Most of the buildings at Sawtooth Maple Syrup are more than 100 years old. The Cordes family brought the buildings to Lutsen from Chisago County. Left: Greg Nichols checks the collection lines, bending the blue tubing that carries the sap and listening for air leaks.
Driving down the long dirt road that leads to Sawtooth Mountain Maple Syrup Company in Lutsen, it looks like Papa Smurf got a little dizzy and designed a super highway for the smurfs to romp about on just above the snowpack. There are smurf blue lines everywhere— some 9 miles of blue plastic hoses hooked up to maple trees. Occasionally the lines conjoin to one of 100 booster pumps where the maple sap carried by the blue plastic tubing gets sent to a sap extractor. From there it is collected and staged in a collection tank before it is pumped to the sugarhouse for boiling, and voila! Yummy syrup for your pancakes just like that.
Simple, right?
It all goes well unless a yellow-bellied sapsucker gets into one of the taps.
“We used polycarbonate spigots this year hoping that would stop the yellow bellied sap suckers from pecking through the taps and making small holes,” said Chris Cordes.
“But, unfortunately the new spigots didn’t slow them down one bit,” Cordes said ruefully. “They cause micro leaks that are hard to find. But they have to be found and the lines have to be fixed.”
To find the leaks Greg Nichols, Chris’s brother-inlaw, bends one of the blue lines and watches. If he can see bubbling air, he will track it and discover the air leak. Sometimes there is a lot of detective work in discovering leaks, said Greg.
At Sawtooth Maple Syrup Company that is just one of many obstacles the family runs into in its yearround effort to get syrup to market. Last summer Chris, his sister and partner Kirstin van den Berg and her husband, Greg Nichols, replaced 2,000 taps and lines and added 5,000 more taps and lines to the business. That addition brought the count to 24,000 tapped trees located on 320 acres of maple tree property they own (plus 25 leased acres from the Forest Service) in Lutsen, making them by far the largest producer of maple syrup in Minnesota.
As far as taking care of all of that blue tubing, it is quite a chore. “Distances walked could be up to 4 miles daily,” said Greg. “But it depends on how far out we need to get to the start of the next line to be tapped. We have had both deer and moose mess with the lines in the farthest west part of the property, but it hasn’t been too bad in the repair department. Deer will hop the lines, moose will just march through them,” he said, adding, “We see lots of wolf signs and on occasion, lynx tracks.”
If it all works out, one tree equals one quart of maple syrup. But the sap run is always contingent upon the weather. If it gets warm too fast the sap stops running. Cold too fast after the run has started and the sap will quit running. Too dry and there is very little sap. Ideally, warm days in the low 40s and cold nights in the mid to upper 20s produce the best sap run conditions.
“We consider ourselves farmers,” said Nichols. And like farmers their crop is extremely weather dependent.
Every year the sugar content is different in the sap. Last year Chris boiled 32 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. This year he is currently boiling 37 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.
“Last year we tapped 19,000 trees and ended up with 5,700 gallons of maple syrup. This year it’s running 37 gallons [of sap] to one gallon of syrup,” said Chris, who added, “This winter every day was a challenge. It was so cold that when the snow fell it was powder. There was no base to walk on. We sank into the snow on our snowshoes. It wasn’t until the last day of tapping that we had a base to walk on. It was brutal. It was the worst full tapping season I have ever seen.”
That said from a man who spent the last 30 years in the maple syrup business.
On January 17, a team of five workers, Chris, Kirstin, Greg, Jim Cordes (Chris and Kirstin’s father) and Dave Tosten, a friend from Pennsylvania, put on snowshoes, grabbed their hammers, drills and taps and began installing the first of 24,000 taps. Kirstin put the final tap in place on February 22 at 1:15 p.m.
Once the taps are in, the crew connects the network to the vacuum and transport lines. The sap is sent to the upper pump house extractor where after 300 gallons of concentrate is gathered it is sent to the sugarhouse where the boiling process begins.
The sap is transported to nine stainless steel collection tanks and then the syrup is stored in barrels until Wild Country Maple Syrup bottles it and distributes it.
The largest collection tank is outside and holds 4,500 gallons. The other eight tanks hold from 700 to 2,300 gallons. While all of the collecting and boiling is going on, Kirstin and Greg’s days are spent looking for micro leaks in the lines, lifting lines out of the snow, and making sure the booster pumps are working properly.
“It’s exhausting work,” said Nichols, who is a fitness instructor in his spare time.
As of April 13, Chris and his mother Marianne had boiled 1,700 gallons of sap.
Some of the sap is golden amber and some of it is dark. The difference in color comes from differences in temperature and quality of the sap, said Kirstin.
For Chris, his mother Marianne, and his father Jim, this is their 30th year of working in the “sugar bush.”
The trio started in Chisago County where many of the buildings that are now on the property in Lutsen have come from. The log buildings are grey and weathered but well built, hand hewn, log structures that date back to the mid 1800s and early 1900s. They look natural, as if they had grown out of the ground and greet you like an old friend. The sugarhouse is newer than the other structures, but fits with the theme.
Visiting Sawtooth Mountain Maple Syrup Company is like stepping back into time, and when the snow leaves visitors are encouraged to come and see the facilities and stock up on some of Mother Nature’s sweetest product. The family will be glad to show you around and talk about the simple process of making maple syrup. You will come away appreciating that golden taste of syrup on your pancakes all the more for your visit.
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