It’s maple season again, which means Julie Ryan at Wild Hill Maple in Salem is spending a lot of time behind the wheel.

“Each one of our tanks are named, so we know where we’re going,” she said while driving down a dirt road, away from the sugarhouse.

Along with her faithful sidekick, Moby, Ryan is in charge of collecting sap from thousands of trees scattered around the sugarhouse.

“You get to see Mother Nature, and you cannot beat that,” she said.

Ryan makes several collections a day from each tank, including “Skellie’s Tank.” It collects 1,200 gallons from about 1,100 trees.

Ryan says collecting the sap is the fun part. While critical, upkeep of the equipment can be labor-intensive.

“We have to walk every single one of these lines, because one single hole in a line will drop the vacuums,” she said.

That is the amount of draw Ryan gets from the woods, so the higher, the better.

Once the truck is full, it’s back to the sugarhouse, where her collection of fresh sap is unloaded and run twice through a reverse osmosis machine, which decreases the amount of water and increases the sugar content.

“I think I got her dialed in,” said Brian Ducharme, as he manned the evaporator.

Ducharme founded Wild Hill nearly 20 years ago.

“I made a quart and something happened,” he said.

Ducharme says the camaraderie among sugarmakers in the area is one of the things he loves the most about the sweet and tasty business.

“You get syrup, you can get granulated sugar, maple cream, maple candy with nothing else added, and it still fascinates me,” he said.

In addition to warmer winters, Ducharme and Ryan are navigating a second season amid the pandemic and slower foot traffic, but they say business is good.

“People are staying home more,” Ducharme said. “They’re eating more pancakes.”

He says they’ve done more home delivery than ever before, but something they will miss for a second year in a row is New York State Maple’s Maple Weekends.

“We love the people so much and we made a lot of friends,” he said. “They’re asking if we’re having it, and it’s really sad to tell them that we can’t.”

But Ducharme and Ryan are adapting to it all, and it’s not deterring them from from churning out their first product of the season.