Sweet Success: Argyle Lake State Park’s 28th Annual Maple Syrup Festival

By Andrew Postle, The Quill

Argyle Lake State Park, in partnership with the Friends of Argyle Lake State Park, hosted the 28th Annual Maple Syrup Festival in the park last Saturday. 

Visitors were able to experience all the steps in producing maple syrup. After a short hayrack ride to the “Sugar Grove,” guests learned how to tap and collect maple sap in groups led by park staff and local Boy Scout Troop 315 from Macomb.

The best maple trees to collect sap from are hard maples like sugar, black, or red maples. They have about a 3% sugar content, meaning you need roughly 40 gallons of sap to produce 1 gallon of syrup. 

Soft maples, like silver maples that are common in yards, only have about 1% sugar content, meaning you would need twice as much sap to produce the same amount of syrup.

The time to tap trees for sap is about a four-week window between winter and spring, when daytime temperatures are above freezing and nighttime temperatures are below freezing. The park was able to collect around 100 gallons of maple sap this year.

A tree must be at least 12” in diameter to be tapped. You want to tap on the south side of the tree, in line with a major root or branch, at a 45-degree angle. 

Today we use metal or plastic spiles, but Native Americans and early American settlers used sumac branches that were whittled on the end, cut with a V-shaped notch, and driven into the tree.

Once the sap is collected, it is taken to the “sugar shack,” where it is boiled down to syrup. To make sure the syrup is the right consistency, a hydrometer is used. 

After being strained a few times, it is bottled and ready for your pancakes. If the syrup gets too hot or is bottled too warm, it will crystallize and form sugar crystals.

Argyle Lake State Park is an oak-hickory native forest, but maples have taken over, especially in lowland and bottom land areas, due to forest fire suppression. 

“When you have two saplings and one’s an oak and one’s a maple, oaks and hickories have the bark that will withstand fire, whereas a maple’s bark is thinner, so a forest that’s managed with fire, you’re going to keep the oak-hickory community in place and not have the maples take over,” stated Natural Resource Coordinator Bridget Hinchee. 

Recently, the park has begun to burn woodlands. The 1,700-acre park burned about 932 acres last year, with another 450 acres planned in 2026.

This year’s festival offered a fun, educational glimpse into a traditional process while highlighting ongoing efforts to restore the park’s natural oak-hickory ecosystem through prescribed burns.

Events like these not only celebrate local heritage and sweet treats but also build community support for sustainable land management, making Argyle Lake State Park a sweeter place for generations to come.