It’s a little late to write this but what the heck maybe you can do this next year assuming you have access to some maple trees. All you need to make maple syrup at home is a large pot that will fit at least a couple gallons of water in. You can pick up some tree taps online or try the local hardware store. If you have a battery drill it makes it easier than an old hand crank drill I used to use. Gather some plastic milk jugs take your taps, drill and a hammer and head for the woods. You need to have these out by March so head out late winter drill your hole, set the tap in with a hammer and simply hang the jug on the tap hook. When the nights are cold and the days are warm the sap flows pretty fast and steady so you will need to empty then once a day on fast running days. Just dump the full milk jugs you hung into a five gallon bucket and head for home. You can simply boil the sap down on your stove in the hours you are at home it doesn’t have to be a continuous boil. Remember it is going to take you collecting 40 gallons of sap for one gallon of syrup, so I used to boil on all four burners and then just consolidate the pots into each other as they boiled down. This will take several days on the stove to achieve when your only boiling from say 5 pm to the time you go to bed. I should also point out that your going to have a lot of humidity in the house from the sap boiling off so unless you have a log house you should turn the stove vent on or open a window, a lot of humidity isn’t going to do your sheet rocked walls very good. I never used a candy thermometer for mine I just boiled it to the consistency I liked and left it at that but you certainly can pick up a thermometer if you wish.  For perfect syrup you need the syrup to boil at 7 degrees above the boiling point of water.  The boiling point of water depends on the elevation you are located in.  Once you have it to the consistency you like you need to let it cool some and then filter the syrup out through some cheesecloth. That’s it, it’s fairly simple and you can get a ton more info probably from google. Just think how satisfying you’ll feel using the syrup you made on your pancakes from now on.     Happy Hiking!!!