Jennifer RiChard picked her way through a web of bright blue plastic tubes in the woods. Each tube ran from a tree, carrying sap to a nearby barn to be boiled down to maple syrup.
On this cold, snowy morning, though, the trees weren’t giving up their sap quite yet.
“They all have ice in them,” said RiChard, inspecting a plastic tap pulled from a tree trunk.
Maple season is in full swing here at Hidden Acres Sugar Bush in Gaylord, a business run by RiChard and her husband. But it wasn’t so long ago that none of this seemed possible.
A difficult year
It’s been a full year since the ice storm that devastated tens of millions of trees across northern Michigan, including many sugar maples. The Michigan Maple Syrup Association estimated that around a third of the state’s annual maple syrup output was lost to storm damage last year.
The RiChards were among those hit especially hard.
Between ruined maple lines and lost future revenue, RiChard put the storm's cost to her business at close to $300,000, only a third of which was covered by insurance. RiChard applied for emergency reimbursement through a U.S. Department of Agriculture program available to farmers and forestland owners, but, like many others, hasn’t heard back.
And while the Federal Emergency Management Agency, earlier this month, approved aid for ice storm recovery, reversing a previous decision, that money is for repairing public utilities, like water, sewer and power systems, and not for individuals.
‘It’s a little emotional’
With the help of family, neighbors and emergency relief volunteers, RiChard’s maple lines are back up and running this season. But everywhere she looked, still, she saw the damage left behind after the 2025 storm.
“If you look up, you'll see how many [tree] tops and branches are missing. Our canopy is really thin. But coming out here now and looking at it, it's a little emotional,” she said. “So much went into [the recovery], and it looks great. Everything's up, everything's parallel, everything's where it's supposed to be, and that’s amazing.”
That recovery didn’t come easily. The RiChards spent months in their woods with tractors, chainsaws and woodchippers.
“It was a massive wear and tear on ourselves, on our [bodies], being out here doing all that physical work constantly.”
When RiChard saw another ice storm in the forecast two weeks ago – a storm coming almost exactly one year after last year's – it was traumatic. She couldn’t stop checking the weather.
“It was so scary to think that something like that, that was considered a once-in-a-lifetime ice storm, was going to hit us back-to-back,” RiChard said. “Had we ever once thought that this … could happen again, we wouldn't have struggled for the year, working sun up to sun down every day, to get it done. We would have just said, ‘This isn't the right region for this type of job, for this type of business.’”
This time, Hidden Acres Sugar Bush made it through the storm just fine. The Michigan Maple Syrup Association confirmed that while a few producers in the Alpena area were hit by the recent storm, the damage wasn't as widespread. The association said there were no sugar bushes that experienced severe damage in both 2025 and 2026.
‘Better than none’
Before the 2025 ice storm, RiChard’s sugar bush had 17,000 tappable maple trees. 4,000 of those will never be tapped again; they sustained too much damage. And the sugar content of the remaining trees has dropped dramatically.
“The sugar is now going [in the tree] to do the repairs,” said RiChard.
Before the storm, RiChard said her trees averaged around 2% sugar content, meaning it took around 65 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.
“We’ve lost at least 1% of our sugar content,” she said.
As a result, it now takes double the amount of sap to make one gallon of syrup. The drop in sugar content should last only while the trees recover, she said, but it’s uncertain how long that will take.
“We are going to definitely fall significantly short of our averages for the season,” RiChard said. “But that's OK; it'll be a season. It's better than none.”
Some other maple producers in northern Michigan are unable to tap this year because of tree damage or lines that haven’t been replaced.
Back in the woods, RiChard snowshoed to another tree, continuing to check taps until she saw something out of the corner of her eye.
“Oh, look, it’s moving,” she said, pointing to a maple line. “Watch those bubbles.”
A small trickle showed, as the first little bit of sap started to move through the tube — sap that, tomorrow, would be boiled down into the next barrel of maple syrup.
