Area students go to Breakheart to learn about sap, sugar, syrup

SAUGUS – Students from around the North Shore descended on Breakheart Reservation in Saugus Thursday morning for a day full of sap, sugar and syrup.Staff from the Department of Conservation and Recreation set up five stations for Breakheart’s annual Maple Sugarin’ program, where kids learned everything from how to identify and tap trees, to the history of syrup and how to properly boil it.Click for a photo gallery of Saturday’s pancake breakfast at Breakheart.Park ranger Mike Nelson taught students how to find the perfect tree for tapping and how to properly get to the sweet stuff.”You’re in the right time and the right place,” Nelson told a crowd of kindergartners from Stoneham. “The first thing you need to do is find the right tree. What kind of tree do we need?”Maple!” they all shouted in unison.Nelson showed the students how to use an old-fashioned hand drill. After the hole was drilled, he hammered in a metal spile, which taps into the tree, and then he hung a tin bucket on it to collect the sap.”We don’t want to do too much damage to the tree,” said Nelson. “It hurts the tree a little bit, but it’s just going to heal over. If you have a healthy tree, you can put a hole in the same tree for more than 100 years.”The students then made their way to the other stations, one to learn about the history of maple syrup, one to learn about how to cut wood and lastly the sugar shack, where Matthew Nash from visitor services manned a giant vat of boiling sap.Nash said it takes around 100 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup.”The sap looks just like water,” said Nash. “This whole process is about getting rid of that water.”At the history station, Lynn Hildenbrand gave an animated lesson on the history of sugaring while the students sat around a steaming cauldron in a fire pit.She told students about the first settlers in America stumbling upon “sapsicles” hanging from trees and the native Americans who taught them how to extract the sap.Hildenbrand said the Native Americans used to cut the trees open with hot rocks, while the settlers figured out how to tap the tree.”Since the dawn of time, there’s nothing added to maple syrup,” said Hildenbrand. “It’s all the sap, but the water is driven out.”She also taught the students about the evolution of sugaring, from tin buckets in the 1800s to the plastic bins and hoses used now.”We do the tapping as a public program the first week in March and people really enjoy coming out for that,” said Hildenbrand, who has been teaching about sugaring for more than five years. “You have to know where your food comes from if you’re going to have any input on what you’re putting into yourself.”She said weather plays a big factor in how much sap is produced, noting that cold nights and warm days are ideal because the cells in the tree contract and expand, acting like a pump that draws the sap up from the roots.Sue Cullen was with her class from Wakefield High School and said Breakheart Reservation is in the perfect location for her.Breakheart will hold its open Maple Sugarin’ program on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The tour costs $4 per person or $20 for a family of six.Matt Tempesta can be reached at [email protected].