PETERSBURG, Pa. — Forty years ago, maple syrup lovers gathered in a back room at Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center to celebrate the spring maple harvest. 

The Maple Harvest Festival at Shaver’s Creek has grown since its beginnings in 1984, but the fundamentals haven’t changed, said Shaver’s Creek Program Director Laurie McLaughlin, who oversees the festival.

Today, more than 225 staff, students and volunteers are involved in putting on the festival, and the center sells 1,600 tickets — up from about 200 in 1984. But people still come to the festival to enjoy the natural world, to celebrate spring, to get outside, to be with their families and friends — and to enjoy pancakes with real maple syrup.

“I’ve seen the program change and grow and yet it’s stayed comfortably the same,” said McLaughlin. “All of these really special things that help connect us to the community is what I love about this festival.”

Tickets for this year’s festival, which will be held Saturday, March 23, and Sunday, March 24, are sold out. 

Key to the success of the festival are the center’s environmental education interns and students from the class McLaughlin teaches on interpreting maple sugaring. At the festival, students teach at educational stations where festivalgoers can learn about the history of maple sugaring, how to identify and tap maple trees, and how sap is collected and transformed into maple syrup.

“This student engagement and experiential learning is so important to developing successful life skills for future employment,” McLaughlin said. 

Many former students and interns come back to volunteer at the festival each year. Olivia Stas, who got involved with the festival her freshman year at Penn State in 2015 and later worked as an intern, helped train this year’s new crop of interns.

“Being part of tapping the actual source, seeing the sap runouts, and getting to know all the work that goes into creating real maple syrup is a great learning experience,” said Stas, who runs the Centred Outdoors program at ClearWater Conservancy in State College.

“It adds that extra connection to something that you’re eating and something that’s happening in your backyard even if you don’t know it.” 

George Vahoviak, a retired Penn State professor and Shaver’s Creek program director, was one of Shaver’s Creek first interns in 1978. As a Penn State graduate student, he helped build the Sugar Shack where sap is boiled down to make maple syrup.

It means a lot that the maple festival is still going strong 40 years later, Vahoviak said. The festival is “more than just a cool thing to do in March,” he said. “It’s a really unique combination of Native American studies, ecology, history — all of those things.”

Megan McCarthy teaches environmental education at the Milton Hershey School, where she runs a maple sugaring program with about 100 third graders. McCarthy, who graduated from Penn State in 2019, credits her experiences in McLaughlin’s class and as an intern with strongly influencing her career choice.

“I didn't know I could be in this field until Shaver’s Creek showed me so many different options,” she said. 

McCarthy said she loved seeing students, staff, interns and community volunteers come together to make the Maple Harvest Festival a success each year, whether they are teaching about how Native Americans used maple sugar, flipping pancakes, or helping park cars.

“It's a massive operation that took so many pieces and parts, but the way it's organized and run is exceptional,” she said. “We all had our own role to make sure it happened.”

“It really means a lot to this community that we’ve had this amazing tradition for 40 years now,” said Stas. “And we’ll be doing it for another 40 years.”

More information about the Maple Harvest Festival is available at the website.