When I was a sophomore at UCLA, I took the Spring quarter off to help my step father make maple syrup. He had a sugar bush in Upper Michigan, in eastern Powell Township on the south shore of Lake Superior. It is about 10 miles west of Big Bay.

I took pictures of the process way back then, but never put them into the photo essay I was planning. Thanks to a film scanner lent to me by by brother-in-law Art, I have good copies of the photos to present here. It was fun to be able to do in Photoshop all the things I did in the darkroom when I first printed the pictures. 30 years after kicking off the project, it is finally complete.

Maple syrup is made by collecting the sap of sugar or hard maple trees in the spring. It is then boiled to concentrate the sugars in the sap to make syrup. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. The first step is to collect the sap. While many people think of buckets on trees, tubing among the trees is far easier and less labor intensive.

If I remember correctly, a tree can support one tap for each 9 inches in diameter. The health of the tree is not affected. The tubing is run so that gravity carries the sap from the trees down to a central collection point. There are producers who use suction pumps to pull in the sap, but our operation was strictly gravity feed.

The sap flows through increasingly larger pipes until it reaches a collection tank.

The sap flows into the tank. This is a pretty good day for sap flow. The trees produce the most sap on days where they have had a hard freeze over night followed by a warm day. The sap is collected from the tank and taken to the sugar house for evaporation. The sap is pumped onto an overhead tank where it can flow by gravity feed into the evaporator. The evaporator has a 20 foot by 8 foot flat pan that sits over a firebox.

A large fire is kept burning so that the sap evaporates quickly. It is important not to let the pan run dry since that would ruin the syrup and the pan. This view looks across the boiling sap between two access ports in the steam hood.

Bubble patterns form in the boiling sap.

It is very critical to monitor the temperature. The temperature rises as the sugar content increases. The syrup must be taken off the evaporator for finishing before it becomes too concentrated.

The evaporator is designed so that the fresh sap flows in at the back, close to the firebox loading point where the heat is the highest. As it gets more concentrated, it flows to the front. When it reaches a critical temperature, it is taken off and filtered. We loaded it into milk cans.

After coming off of the evaporator, the syrup is not quite at the maximum sugar content for high quality syrup. The syrup is finished on a propane stove and then bottled.

The finished product! You can see the convection in the freshly bottled syrup.

Here is the production crew.

Finally, an shot of the road heading away from Camp. White everywhere.