GAYLORD, Mich.—Michigan sugarmakers are rallying around fellow producers who were hit two weeks ago with a generational ice storm, trying to help them salvage a maple season.

“We have been very blessed,” said Jen Richards, who estimates that she and her husband Troy lost nearly their entire sugarwoods in the storm, the 2 inches of ice snapping all the crowns to the ground, leaving only the stems.

They have a 17,000 tap operation near the Mackinac Bridge that connects the Upper and Lower peninsulas of the state.

Over the past week, Richards said upwards of 100 people—other sugarmakers from Michigan, a large group from the Christian Disaster Fund and neighbors—cleared more than 172 miles of sap lines.

Believe it or not, the Richards are are still hoping to make more syrup this season.

The trees still have sap in the trunks, even through the crowns are gone.

“We will see what we can eke out,” she told The Maple News.

Richards said she was at 81 barrels of production when the storm began on March 29. The ice didnt stop for upwards of five days. They were still hoping to make it to 100 barrels once the favorable sugaring weather returns, expected to be this weekend.

Meanwhile, the Forrester family in Atlanta, Mich. were also devastated. 

Dale Forrester told The Maple News that he estimates that 8,000 of his 10,000 taps were damaged and most of the woods destroyed.

“We’re looking at mostly a savage situation at this point,” he said.

The Forresters said they were also blessed with upwards of 50 volunteers, many of them fellow sugarmakers from the southern part of the state, trying to repair mainline and restore vacuum, which maybe will allow Forrester to make syrup this weekend.

Forrester said out of the estimated 3,300 lateral runs of tubing in his woods, all but 50 were brought to the ground. That’s in addition to the mainlines.

“We got a lot of fight left, that’s for sure,” Forrester said.

Still, with the sugarwoods almost completely destroyed, he said he will likely have to find a new location to make syrup.

“We figure out of our 16,000 tress, probably 70 percent of them were broke in half, or capped,” he said.

A few towns below, Nathan Delke of Hawks, Mich. said his farm was hit, but not nearly as bad, losing an estimated 10 percent of his trees.

“We have spent nearly 200 man hours in past 4 or 5 days to get the woods back up and fit vacuum issues,” Delke told The Maple News. “We still have no power.”

The storm reminded a lot of sugarmakers of the big ice storm of 1998 that wiped out trees in Northern New York and Northern Vermont.

“It’s like an F5 tornado or a hurricane went through,” Delke said.