Camp Cullom’s annual Pancake Breakfast and Maple Trail Vendors Market will return March 14–15, offering North Central Indiana families a chance to watch maple sap turn into syrup, enjoy an all‑you‑can‑eat breakfast, and explore one of the community’s signature outdoor assets just west of Frankfort. The event pairs a hands‑on maple syrup demonstration by Atchley Farm with a free‑will‑donation breakfast at the Camp Cullom Lodge.
Maple Syrup Weekend Details
The Pancake Breakfast runs Saturday, March 14, from 8 to 11 a.m., and Sunday, March 15, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., at Camp Cullom, 6815 W County Road 200 North near Frankfort. Breakfast is all you can eat and includes pancakes, sausage and gravy, biscuits, coffee and juice for a free‑will offering. Guests can then walk over to the Sugar Shack and Nature Center area to see syrup being made and shop the Maple Trail Vendors Market.
Atchley Farm of Mulberry, in its third year of making maple syrup at Camp Cullom, will again make and supply the syrup served on the pancakes. “You get to see the process of how the syrup is made and be able to taste it on your pancakes and get real quality syrup,” said producer Nick Atchley. He added that last year they “ran out super quick,” so this season they have focused on making and bottling enough syrup for visitors.
Along with syrup, the vendor market at the Camp Cullom Nature Center is expected to feature honey, kettle corn, local nonprofits and church groups, and other small businesses from the Tippecanoe and Clinton County area, including a noodle booth from the Methodist church in Mulberry. Atchley said he hopes residents will come out “even if you’re not there to get syrup,” because “at least you could show up just to show some support for other local businesses.”
How the Sap Becomes Syrup
This year Atchley Farm tapped 103 maple trees on the Camp Cullom property, using modern gravity‑fed tubing instead of hanging buckets on individual trees. The plastic lines run from small spiles drilled just a quarter‑ to half‑inch into the trunk and feed into central collection tanks in the woods. That approach, Atchley said, is “way more sanitary” than buckets because sap moves through closed tubing straight into a holding tank, keeping out gnats, bugs and other debris that have to be filtered when using open pails.
Weather plays a critical role in how well the sap flows. Atchley explained that ideal conditions are “between 20 and 30 degrees at night” and “about 40 to 50 degrees during the day” to trigger the trees to release sap. Too warm for too long, he said, and the trees begin to bud, the sap turns “sour,” and it loses the sugar content needed for syrup.
The sap itself is clear and only faintly sweet, “like sugar water,” with typical sugar content of just 1–2 percent. To turn that into syrup, the collected sap is boiled for hours at the sugar house to evaporate the water and concentrate the sugars. “A lot of times it’ll take 40 to 50 gallons of sap just to make one gallon of maple syrup,” Atchley said. That long, careful boil is why he calls real maple syrup a “delicate process,” noting that a few bad minutes at the pan can scorch a batch or ruin a night’s work.
Last season, working off both Camp Cullom and a cousin’s property, Atchley Farm collected about 1,300 gallons of sap over a four‑ to six‑week sugaring season. This year the crew is concentrating only on Camp Cullom’s roughly 50 wooded acres, tapping a mix of black, silver and sugar maples, with hopes of experimenting with walnut and sassafras trees for different natural flavors in the future.
More information about Atchley Family Farms is available at www.AtchleyFarmstead.com.
Camp Cullom: More Than Syrup
While maple weekend is a seasonal highlight, organizers hope visitors will also discover what Camp Cullom offers the rest of the year. The youth‑focused, non‑profit 90 acre camp includes more than five miles of marked hiking trails, a Nature Center, Lodge with Fire Place, camping areas, ponds, a playground and one of Indiana’s top disc‑golf courses. Under some of the county’s darkest rural skies, the Prairie Grass Observatory on site regularly hosts public astronomy open houses where families can view the Moon, planets and deep‑sky objects through large telescopes.
Camp facilities can be reserved for reunions, receptions, youth programs and other events. More information about Camp Cullom is available at 765-296-2753 or at CampCullom.org.
Atchley said the maple project is one of several hands‑on learning efforts tied to the camp. Atchley Farms is also involved with honeybees, vegetables and a developing downtown storefront for Atchley Farm products. “We’re still learning,” he said of the young syrup operation, “but we look forward to seeing everybody come out in the community and hopefully you guys can enjoy what we offer every year forward from here.”
Residents who can’t make it to maple weekend will be able to find Atchley Farm syrup later this year at the Lafayette and Carmel farmers markets and, as volume allows, at the Market on Main store in downtown Lafayette. But for a close‑to‑home taste of Clinton County woods and a look at how local sap becomes breakfast syrup, Camp Cullom’s March 14–15 weekend will offer the fullest experience.
