Nature therapy, with homemade syrup

2025 has been miserable in a lot of ways, but this weekend the good people of Cedar Rapids could take comfort in a long-standing community tradition: the spring Maple Syrup Festival at Indian Creek Nature Center. Saturday was overcast but unseasonably warm--we might have beaten the normal high temperature by 20 degrees. The Nature Center announced on social media Sunday the total attendance over the two days was close to 3000, about 10 percent above last year.

Skies over the Nature Center grounds: If you look
very closely, you can see a kite in the sky

Saturday mid-morning the crowd was sizable but easily managed. The parking lot was very full, with cars spilling out onto Otis Road.

Parking lot, Indian Creek Nature Center

There was less competition for parking spaces farther away, for those willing to walk. I parked just off Mount Vernon Road, which netted me a pleasant walk in via the Sac and Fox Trail...

Trees along the trail, including derecho damage

...as well as sighting two unusual birds as I drew near. (I tried to identify them with the resources at the Nature Center, and guess they may have been red-breasted nuthatches. Many people know birds better than I do, but they weren't with me, so as far as anyone knows they were red-breasted nuthatches.)

Volunteers from the Carpenters' Union served pancakes and sausage

I sat in the main room next to a couple I recognized from events at Coe College; a lively young family of five presently joined us. Elsewhere in the room there were people from church, one of my sons' former teachers, my former physician (now retired), two former attendees of Corridor Urbanism meetings, and many many people I don't know. 

Volunteer Justin Voss kept us supplied with juice, milk, and coffee

For this morning, anyway, we all were comforted by comfort food and surrounded by nature. Maybe not everything will be okay, and things certainly will never be perfect, but for the moment we were together and all was very very good.

Obligatory food porn picture

Music by Sheila Stevens: I caught covers of Kacey
Musgraves and Starship

After lunch, looking through the picture windows 
at the Bird Sanctuary

SEE ALSO: 

"Making Sweet Connections to Nature," Indian Creek Nature Center, 26 March 2025

"Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Day," Holy Mountain, 24 March 2024

"Maple Syrup Festival 2016," Holy Mountain, 19 March 2016 [last one at the old Round Barn location]

Last year, there was snow!

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Day

 

It seems I'm always ready for March to bring Indian Creek Nature Center's annual maple syrup festival, even when the last two months in the Midwest hardly qualified as winter. Then Friday came a surprise snowstorm, thick goopy stuff that arrived so suddenly the schools didn't have time to cancel classes. It was already melting by Saturday, but enough remained to lend some scenery to the pancakes and sausages. The Nature Center estimated Sunday that 2700 people came through the lines over the course of the weekend, which means the staff and volunteers served at the rate of 300 people an hour!

This way to the pancakes!

Hard at work over the griddles

Waiting for the next batch: Untimely equipment failure
created some brief backlogs

Refilling the sausage tray

It all plated nicely.

Syrup was made from the Nature Center's own trees.
Coffee donated by Caribou

Most of our party had seconds, which encouraged an after-breakfast hike:

Woodland Trail view

Along the trail:
The old Bertram Road bridge has been repurposed

Amazing Space building

McCarty Wetland

On a chilly morning, few if any people had their pancakes outdoors. There was plenty of room inside in the main hall, where we sat and where there was musical entertainment. People used the classrooms, too, where the ambience doubtless was quieter. We saw a few people we knew, and a lot of people we didn't. What a great place to see your community!

There were also demonstrations of syrup-making down the road at the former Nature Center space.

For the Nature Center, greeting 2700 happy pancake eaters, not to mention mobilizing two days' worth of volunteers, is a good way to promote the many ways it provides value to the community: trails, programs for all ages, acres of wild space, and modeling ecological living. I love the Nature Center, but I confess there are years where I go from maple syrup festival to maple syrup festival without ever getting back. It's good to be reminded that it's here, every day of the year, and doing a lot of good work.

This is particularly important as our warm winter signals the steady accumulation of climate change. I enjoy a clement day as much as anyone, but the last nine months have been the warmest on record worldwide, the oceans have never been this warm in human history, winters are getting warmer, and springs are getting earlier. Something is going down, something that we have only a partial notion of, and it's not going to be pretty. Or clement. It's messing with syrup production, too: this year Nature Center trees produced only 500 gallons of sap (last year they got 2000); the variability affects private producers, too, like Danno Potter of Garnavillo, who told the Cedar Rapids Gazette: It puts a lot of pressure on us. We can't be wrong.... I drink a lot of coffee in the morning thinking how I can (adapt) (Miller 2024). Coffee's going to be affected, too, of course! The Nature Center crowd knows all this, or most of them do anyway. They know we have to live with and in nature, not just put it on our pancakes, and even in a town where you can get anywhere in a car in 15 minutes.

Speaking of which, the Nature Center's remote location has given it room to expand in a genuinely unspoiled area, and to develop an impressive range of hiking trails on its large campus, but it's difficult to get there without a car. (This is shown by the jaw-dropping spread of parked cars during Nature Center events. Cars are bigger than people, of course.) As our metro trail network gets fleshed out, it will be easier to get there by bicycle, at least in the warm months. It's almost three miles from the nearest bus stop, at the Mount Vernon Road Hy-Vee, and there's far from being enough potential traffic to warrant extending the #2 line out this far. It's a conundrum.

Getting all those people there required a lot of cars

Indian Creek Nature Center is on Facebook and Instagram and in the blogosphere. Not on Mastodon, yet, however.

SEE ALSO: "Maple Syrup Festival 2023," 26 March 2023

Maple Syrup Festival 2023

 

A sure sign of spring, even on a blustery overcast day, is the annual Maple Syrup Festival at Indian Creek Nature Center. This year was the 40th such event, so we had even more reason to celebrate! I don't know how much of the metro population attends or volunteers during the course of the weekend, but it's well into the thousands, making this annual experience once that is shared around a pretty fair proportion of the community. The Maple Syrup Festival, along with Christmas, Pride and the Freedom Festival in the summer, and maybe some high school and college sports are ways we mark the year together.

Serving lines were short mid-morning Sunday

Beverages served inside

Bluegrass music

Obligatory food porn

a little early maybe? but it's 5:00 somewhere

Syrup is produced onsite
 (We're eating last year's crop)

The Nature Center promised "We won't run out of pancakes," but warned "We will run out of parking." It struck me as we ate in the auditorium that you and your family of whatever size could have easily found a place to sit down, but as usual cars were spread all over the property and down the roads. That shows, as if it needed showing, how huge a footprint cars require. It's the same at a Kernels game. I used to joke that it seemed like everyone at the game drove themselves to the game, then walked home and drove their other car to the game, but ha ha, no, that's how much space cars take. We need to stop taking all this for granted.

I also reflected, maybe because the day before I'd taken a group of students to the State Capitol in Des Moines, that semi-wild spaces like the Nature Center are at once a commodity (that we can sell to tourists), an amenity (that makes life in Cedar Rapids fun), and a space for nature. The Nature Center, as you can tell from their website, works really hard to make the fun educational, and nature education fun. And of course, the income generated by the Maple Syrup Festival helps pay for the year-round care they provide their property. Wild spaces are an unqualified good, though, and shouldn't require tourism to make us value them.

I'm not sure these days what Iowa values anymore--stay tuned for my annual pan-the-legislature post in about a month--but the Nature Center, in its quiet and subversively fun way, is doing great work in maintaining natural space, both for our use and for the rest of nature.

turkey vulture

forest slowly restoring itself,
but still scarred from the storm in 2020

fungi found a tree stump

SEE ALSO: "Urbanism at the Nature Center? Heck Yeah!" 23 March 2019

Urbanism at the Nature Center? Heck, yeah!

March in Cedar Rapids means it's time for pancakes at Indian Creek Nature Center! After a long winter and some heavy early rains, the day was sunny and bright and welcome. The annual Maple Syrup Festival, now in its 36th year, has grown bigger than ever since the Nature Center moved into its new space in 2015. When we arrived mid-morning on Saturday, over 1000 people had preceded us. Some of them are pictured in the pancake line above!

After our pancakes, we walked around of the trails on the Nature Center campus. We went for the hilly paths, because low-lying areas were still flooded.

Helga Mayhew, who was volunteering at the event, asked me, "So is this urbanism?" Yes, it is--Thanks for asking! Community is a hallmark of urbanism, and the Maple Syrup Festival is a highlight of the city's calendar, a one-weekend event that brings together people from all over the area. Not only that, but it mobilizes a huge force of volunteers, taking tickets, flipping pancakes, clearing tables and guiding people towards parking spaces. That's an even stronger community-building feature.

The Nature Center, located on a huge campus southeast of the city, exemplifies the priceless wild areas that have been under pressure from the suburban model that has dominated American development for the last six decades. The more we urbanize, the more land there is for farming and wilderness. The Nature Center has been a leader in preserving wilderness in the Cedar Rapids area, most recently adding the Etzel Sugar Grove Farm in rural Linn County.

The one way that I can imagine to improve the urbanism of the Maple Syrup Festival is to provide some transportation options. City buses don't run this far, and with the trails soggy-to-flooded the only way to get here is by private car. (We can argue whether Mt. Vernon Road is bikable. I say not.)

Cars were parked in lots and all along Otis and Bertram Roads. A shuttle bus was running people between the main building and the old barn (which itself served as the Nature Center for many years)...

..but you still had to drive out and park at or near one of the buildings. I wonder, given the increasing popularity of the event as well as the environmental mission of the Nature Center, if an alternative means of transportation could be devised?

SEE ALSO: "First Maple Syrup Festival in New Digs," 22 March 2017

[If you're reading this in time, the Maple Syrup Festival continues Sunday 3/24 from 8-12:30. The Nature Center is located at 5300 Otis Road SE.]

First Maple Syrup Festival in new digs

Last weekend's 34th annual Maple Syrup Festival was the first held at Indian Creek Nature Center's new location at 5300 Otis Road SE...

...and about the best-attended-ever as well. About 2500 people had been through the line by the time we got there late Sunday morning.

There were plenty of pancakes and...

...syrup (here, sap collecting from trees near the old barn)...

...but a sudden dearth of sausages stalled the line for about 20 minutes.

Raptor demonstration

The natural amphitheater near the facility is named in honor of Rich Patterson, the visionary director whose long years of leadership helped make the Nature Center a community institution. He's pictured here with his wife Marian, who also served the community in many important ways, including as my son's first P.E. teacher.

The weather was sunny and seasonally pleasant, making for a great day to celebrate nature and the community, traditions and those who helped make them.

SEE ALSO: Cindy Hadish, "Sap Flows Early in Warm Winter as Indian Creek Nature Center Readies Maple Syrup Fest," Homegrown Iowan, 4 March 2017

LAST YEAR'S FESTIVAL: "Maple Syrup Festival 2016," 19 March 2016

Maple syrup festival 2016

March in Cedar Rapids means it's maple syrup time at the Indian Creek Nature Center! To say that this is a much-anticipated event in our community may underestimate the case. Cars were lined up along Bertram Road by the time we got there this morning.

Volunteers were hard at work directing traffic, making pancakes...

...and demonstrating traditional crafts.

The syrup for your pancakes came from sap from maple trees at the nature center. The sap started running early this year, explained our guide, but then it got too warm in March and it stopped running. He said tappers took about 5 percent of the sap from each tree, so it's sustainable. (Take too much and the tree will die, see.)

So today the vats just had water boiling in them, for ambience. The syruping totals for this year:

The syrup we had on our pancakes, then, was not only delicious but precious. If you wanted seconds, and I did, you went to Glenn.

We were kept company not only by our fellow townspeople of all ages, but by the nature center's numerous displays...

...and a jazz combo that defied all stereotypes and joined us early on this Saturday morning. (Behind them is a map of the Cedar River watershed.)

While enjoying good fellowship in a place that celebrates our connection to nature, I was reminded that an advantage of the compact urban form this blog keeps promoting is that it leaves more room for natural spaces. Suburban sprawl crowds out natural spaces. If you want to live close to nature, paradoxical as it may seem, live in a city and help others to do so.

This was not only the 33rd annual Maple Syrup Festival at Indian Creek, it was the final one in the round barn that has served that nature center for decades. Work is well along on the "Amazing Space" that will serve as the nature center's new home soon.

What will happen with their old building is up in the air. Development assistant Nancy Lackner told me the building is owned by the City of Cedar Rapids, so it's theirs to dispose of. There's been talk of a bike shed (the Sac and Fox Trail runs close by) or a demonstration farm, but nothing definite. I'm sure the right decision will be made when the time comes, but I've attended so many programs and eaten so many pancakes in this old barn I'd like to go back and see it every now and then.

The barn as barn; from indiancreeknaturecenter.org

[If you're reading this in time, the Maple Syrup Festival continues Sunday 3/20 from 8-12:30. The Nature Center is located at 6665 Otis Road SE.]

SEE ALSO: Cindy Hadish, "Last Maple Syrup Festival in Indian Creek Nature Center Barn," Homegrown Iowan, 18 March 2016

PREVIOUS POSTS
"Groundbreaking at Indian Creek's Amazing Space," 1 August 2015
"Maple Syrup Time!" 22 March 2015
"Maple Syrup Festival," 1 March 2014