The Wild Woods Maple 2026 Maple Sugaring Season
“To make matters worse, after the trees became upside-down it snowed and snowed and snowed.”
Our 2026 maple season was one amazing life experience. We battled the elements of winter. We rejoiced in the ownership of a tractor. Some more maple syrup awards were won. We broke any and all production records. Our processes in the sugar house got much more refined. Most importantly, we made some great tasting organic maple syrup, a lot of it!
The snow depths in our woods got deeper faster than would have liked. Immediately after hunting season I started putting spouts on our drop lines to expedite the tapping process. I took a small break from all woods work through the holidays and when I returned to the woods I was amazed at how much snow had piled up. This made getting to every tree much more strenuous. Tapping started for us in mid-January this year. I had help for the first day and we got a lot of trees tapped which felt like nice progress. That feeling of progress was short-lived. After that day of tapping there was a localized ice storm that only affected really high elevation terrain. Terrain like exactly where all our maple trees are. All of the under-story and mid-story trees were now sideways or completely bent over so their top was on the ground. This made for very complicated navigation of our forest! The inverted trees also pulled all out lateral sap line tubing to the ground. To make matters worse, after the trees became upside-down it snowed and snowed and snowed. I still had 5,900 more trees to tap.
Our woods after the localized ice storm that we had right after we started tapping trees.
So with our forest a mess, over 3 feet of snow on the ground and with no help in sight I got started opening our woods roads back up. By opening the roads I would be able to get our tracked ATV out into the forest. Opening the roads took me about a week of very hard and frustrating work. The VAST snowmobile trail was also closed for a few weeks and I was happy when the amazing volunteers or theirs opened up the trail that cuts across our property. Finally by the end of January I had vehicular access to our forest where the maple sap comes from.
The month of February is a blur in my memory. I know I tapped many trees many days in a row. I know I kept track of where all the trees had fallen on the mainlines so I could go back to dig snow, chainsaw tree and fix sap lines. I know I did get a lot of trees tapped and I got in really good shape from all the thrashing I did in our tangled web of a forest on snowshoes. I remember lots of breaks sitting on my backpack contemplating life and wondering how to build a dome over our 100 acres to keep some snow out. We had an unknown amount of snow on the ground in our forest. I never saw the bottom and never cared to dig for it to get a snow depth measurement but it was well over three feet deep. There was at least a crust so the snowshoeing was better than the previous season. I wrestled countless sap lines out of the snow that had been pulled under by the inverted trees. I slowly made progress as the month disappeared and turned to March.
In March we knew we would be collecting and boiling sap soon enough and we had to put the finishing touches on our tree tapping. I only got 5,000 of our 6,600 trees tapped and I was good with that. 5,000 is a nice round number to roll into a sugaring season with. It was more than we tapped the previous year. Most every maple syrup producer taps all their trees every year and I hope to join that club someday. In the meantime, I’m happy to have a rotation of trees that get a year off from being tapped. Got to hunt the good stuff rather than dwell on not tapping everything. I suspect we own and operate the highest elevation maple operation in New England. Our sugar house sits over 2,200 feet of elevation and all our sap flows downhill to the sugar house. This high elevation does not make for easy work, but it makes our maple operation and more specifically our forest very unique from a syrup production perspective.
As I thrashed around and got our trees tapped, I had moments where I thought I would be happier tapping trees in the valley where there is less snow. But I always choose hard and rewarding over easy. That’s just me. I have countless examples of this. Our forest is beautiful and our sugar maple trees are very hearty. They live a rugged slow growing life up high in our woods. These environmental conditions that our trees endure make our tree sap different and provide a unique taste of place or “Terroir” for our maple syrup. I think of this constantly as I struggle-bus my way around our woods. If these trees didn’t make amazing syrup, it would not be as enjoyable to tap them and I wonder if it would be worth the effort. The “Best in Show” award we won at the Vermont Maple Festival after the 2025 maple season really keeps me going. That syrup contest has given our whole syrup producing family a ton of pride and confidence in our product and it justifies the insane work we put into our business.
We eventually got the tubing system leak-free and we collected some sap. We got the tubing rinsed. We got the RO cleaned. We got everything ready for boiling and syrup production. Our first boil was around mid-march. It was a small one but we got the pans sweetened and made a barrel of syrup. In 2025 I wrote some operating procedures down and they were helpful before and after each boil. Our season was awesome, we all loved every minute of it. Our processes were refined even more than ever before and we were making more syrup per boiling day than ever before. We fired on all cylinders! I added a pumping line from one storage tank to another so we could store up to 18,000 gallons of tree sap. This was a good move because once the snow receded and we got big runs of sap we needed every inch in our tanks. There were many days we were not able to find the bottom of our tanks. The sap ran faster than we could turn it to syrup, a great problem/blessing for a maple producer to have. We love being buried in sap, especially with really high sap sugar content.
A great thing I did this year was start super early in the morning. I would turn on the RO before 5:00 AM and be boiling by 7:00. This allowed us to finish early and get much needed sleep each night. I’m not a boil 24 hours kind of guy. I hope to never break equipment from operator error due to exhaustion. I feel that if I’m tired, there is a chance I’m not making as good of syrup as I could.
This is just one of the sap mainlines that got dug out before being chainsawed to free the stuck sap line. Imagine snowshoeing with a chainsaw, this shovel and other tools through the woods pictured above!
Our tractor was great for getting wood into the sugar house. We could get the bucket near the door and easily stack wood inside. Katie did this many times by herself while I cooked sap. This was super helpful when we boiled 6 days in a row. Using the tractor to plow the driveway out gave us much better access to everything and made our season a little easier. I still owe a huge thank you to the Farmer Veteran Coalition and Kubota for this rig. It has had such a positive impact!
Another load of firewood making its way to the sugar house.
Katie kept the sugar house stocked with wood to burn.
Teaching the next generation how to make sure our organic maple syrup is the correct density, it is a small target to hit!
Rob ensuring perfect maple syrup density with our hydrometer.
Towards the end of our season, we attended the Kingdom Maple Festival in St. Johnsbury. We entered their inaugural maple syrup competition and we were excited to attend a festival we had never been to before. It lined up perfectly with a day we were not boiling so we were able to attend and chill out for the day, some much needed rest after a hard-fought sugaring season. We ate pancakes and met some very nice vendors as we made our way around town. We were very excited to have our syrup be expertly judged and chosen to win the Dark Robust maple syrup category! That made for 2 “Best in Class” awards in as many years that our maple syrup has won! Our Dark Robust maple syrup was judged on its color, clarity, density and most importantly flavor. I give all credit to our trees for the exceptional flavor in our maple syrup. Our trees “Terroir” makes their sap and our syrup special. To put in the work in the woods, battle through doubt but then have the syrup you produced win its class in a contest is a great thing! We also got a ribbon for “excellent” maple syrup at the Vermont Maple Festival. An oil painting I made while resting from tapping won first place in the Sappy Art Show in St. Albans. Our oldest daughter got first place in the youth talent show at the Vermont Maple Festival. She also got first place in the youth poetry contest.
The ribbon our “Best in Class” Dark Robust organic maple syrup won at the 2026 Kingdom Maple Festival. This was the biggest award our syrup won this year! our syrup was judged on color, clarity, density and most importantly, great flavor.
We had really high vacuum levels in our tubing thanks to our expert woods crew!
Our Ribbon at the 2026 Vermont Maple Festival syrup contest. We always have a great time at this event and we are very thankful to the volunteers that make the festival happen.
The view from next to our evaporator, each of those barrels holds 40 gallons of our great tasting Vermont wood fired maple syrup. It all starts in our woods and this is where the sap is turned to syrup.
Taps got pulled and we got syrup bottled for markets. We are now in the swing of summer and looking forward to boiling in our sugar house next year. We are very thankful to all our customers who have chosen our syrup over other syrups that are also well made by other hard working maple syrup producers like us. I love the comments I get from customers. They are all positive and keep us going through the hard days. There is a lot of good maple syrup out there and we love to hear people say how much they love our flavor, brand and story! We appreciate the whole Vermont maple community. All our wood is stacked and we are ready to rock next sugaring season!
Summer 2026. All our wood is stacked and we are ready for next sugaring season!
