Tribe hopes sugar shack will bring sweet success

MAT-SU — Next to a wide spot on Wendt Road near Hatcher Pass, a plywood-sided shack with vents in its roof spouts steam like a witch's cauldron.

It's a sugar shack, and part of the small but growing Valley birch syrup industry. This particular sugar shack is operated by the forestry department of the Chickaloon Village Traditional Council (CVTC).

The birch syrup produced here is sold in bottles for about $2.50 an ounce. It's not gold, but it does have value, and as one of the first commercial products from Chickaloon land, it's a harbinger of changes to come in the local economy.

That's because Chickaloon-Moose Creek Native Association Inc. and CVTC together hold title to about 64,000 acres of land around Southcentral Alaska. Chickaloon has plenty of options, options the Village council and corporate management admit they are just beginning to explore.

"We're seeing if this will work as a small part of a larger forestry management plan," said Chickaloon's chief, Gary Harrison. As chief, Harrison represents the traditional council's political concerns, but he also wears the CEO hat for the corporation, and keeps track of shareholders' financial concerns.

"And sometimes I work the night shift at the sugar shack," he said, on a recent Saturday.

As for the 64,000 acres (with about 8,000 more in potential claims) Harrison and Chickaloon employees don't talk about what plans they have. It's not that Chickaloon's plans are secret, it's just that the plans are in the formative stage.

"We're developing a business plan and a 20-year comprehensive forestry plan," said CVTC forestry manager Stephen Simmons.

Simmons said the syrup operation was an inexpensive and low-impact way to get a forest project going. Although it doesn't have the financial weight of logging or subdividing the land, the project has other rewards.

"People are interested in jumping in because they have an opportunity to learn," Simmons said. "It's proved to be an excellent tool for the youth . . . every teen-ager and child that got involved in it really enjoyed it. They had a blast even though they did some really hard work."

The work of the syrup operation is walking the forest, inserting plastic taps into trees, collecting Zip-loc bags of sap, and transporting it to the sugar shack via four-wheelers and snowmachines.

The sap is as clear as water when it comes from the trees, removing the water and caramelizing the sugar content is all it takes to make syrup.

The first bottles of Chickaloon syrup were produced in 1998. That year Harrison used wood fire to cook the sap down, but the operation has progressed and become more complex since then.

"We learned how to do it the hard way first," Harrison said.

This year the sap goes through a reverse osmosis (RVO) filtering system to take water out before cooking. RVO's are sometimes used to purify sea water, but in this case the water is discarded and the remaining distilled sap is poured into the sugar shack's cooker.

Harrison said the RVO saves energy even though it requires electricity to run. That's because the syrup-cooking machine making all the sweet- smelling steam is basically a blast furnace burning fuel oil on the bottom of a stove. Removing water content with the RVO saves energy during cooking.

Harrison said part of the production plan is to rotate the taps through the forest every three years, but the electricity for the RVO will likely keep the sugar shack in one place.

This particular tract of Chickaloon-owned land is 320 acres, but the current syrup operation takes only about five acres. Simmons and Harrison wouldn't say how much the syrup operation makes a year, only that it was in the experimentation and evaluation stages.

"This was an experiment in economic development with a non-timber forest product that's environmentally friendly and sustainable,"Simmons said.

He won't commit to a prediction about the project's future, but simple math on the syrup project shows its potential, and sheds some light on the options facing Chickaloon as plans are made for the checkerboard of 64,000 acres of Chickaloon land that's scattered around Southcentral Alaska.

The three-year tap rotations make the 320 acres usable in thirds. That would make for 100 acres of sap-producing trees each year, or an operation 20 times the size of the current experiment. It's heady stuff, especially given that this particular tract is less than one-half of one percent of Chickaloon's total land holdings.

All that land has Simmons and his employers spending much more time in the offices at Chickaloon working on future plans, than at the sugar shack on Wendt Road.