Monroe County Conservation District celebrated 44 years of maple sugaring tours at the Meesing outdoor site.

The tour is designed to teach people the science of maple trees, the history of maple sugaring and give them a chance to see maple syrup being made.

Each year the Maple Sugarbush outside Marshalls Creek comes alive with the sweet aroma of boiling maple syrup and a hint of burning wood.

But before you see where the magic happens, you will hear a story of how the Native Americans accidentally discovered that the clear liquid that looks like water is very sweet and, when cooked, becomes a thick, sticky syrup.

“I am going to tell you a legend on how the Indians discovered maple syrup,” said Alesia Gallow, one of the environmental instructors at Meesing.

One day a woman was making stew, and her chief threw his tomahawk into the maple tree where she was cooking, and it made a gash. The sap dripped into her cooking vessel. She walked over and touched the spot where the tomahawk had made the gash and realized some of the clear sap had fallen into the vessel. When the stew was done, it had a sweet, delicious taste. The Native Americans learned how to cook the sap into hard sugar to be used in cooking. It soon became a staple during the long winters, Gallow explained.

It wasn’t long before the smell of wood smoke coaxed the visitors down the trail through the woods to the sugar shack. Here is where the magic begins as buckets and buckets of clear maple sap are cooked and turned into thick amber maple syrup.

“You won’t find any fructose sugar in this syrup,” said Brittany Coleman, who is an environmental instructor who helps with the actual cooking of the sap.

She also helps stoke the fire in the evaporator that is fueled by wood. “Keeping the temperature high enough for the water to cook out of the sap takes an enormous amount of wood, and lots of help to keep the fire hot enough,” she said.

“Once the sap starts to thicken, it is important to keep close watch using the spoon test,” Matt Gambra said.

The spoon test is when you dip the spoon into the cooking syrup, and when the syrup coats the spoon it is cooked,” Coleman said. “We also have temperature gauges, too.”

While the sap is cooking away, you can walk through the woods and hear the plunk, plunk of sap dripping from the tree tap into the metal bucket.

Making real maple syrup is a labor of love. It usually takes approximately 40 gallons of sugar maple sap to make 1 gallon of syrup.

It depends on the sugar content of the sap. The more sugar the tree sap has, the quicker it cooks. If you have a tree that has sap that contains more water, it takes longer to boil down to the syrup stage, Gambra said.

For information on programs at the Monroe County Environmental Education Center contact the center at 570-629-3061 from 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m.-1 p.m. some Saturdays or go to mcconservation.org.