Photos: Birch syrup, the sweetest sign of spring

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Mark Goudey, originally from Vermont, made maple syrup for 12 years before coming to Alaska to make birch syrup. Family-owned Kahiltna Birchworks has been producing birch syrup for 25 years, first on a remote homestead and now on a much larger scale in Talkeetna. Apr 29, 2014

TALKEETNA -- At first glance, the setup at Kahiltna Birchworks seems like something out of a sci-fi movie. There are thousands of white 5-gallon buckets hanging off of trees, all filled with a clear, watery liquid that slowly oozes out the white birch trees to which they're connected. If there's not a bucket, there's a translucent blue tube attached and wrapped around the tree, some connected with a maze of wires. That same clear liquid gurgles and bubbles through the tubes toward a central collection point, a small, plywood building housing a gently humming diesel engine that sucks the liquid out and into a nearby 2,500-gallon collection drum.

Other areas of these woods have well-marked trails with names like "Yellow Brick Road" for the "sap suckers," a group of five people who wander through the boreal forest just off of the Parks Highway, north of the Talkeetna Spur Road. Each sap sucker has 850 trees apiece, each tree producing just under a gallon of sap a day, and they run through the woods, collecting hundreds of gallons sap to boil down into the "Kahiltna Gold" birch syrup.

Read more: Sweet signs of spring at Talkeetna birch syrup farm