Hundreds Turn Out for Whitetop Mountain Maple Festival

WHITETOP, Va. – In the wet and the fog and the mud, people came out in droves Saturday to welcome spring with the first seasonal festival of the year: the Whitetop Mountain Maple Festival.

“The weather’s unpredictable up here … Mother Nature controls all of this, so you’ve just got to work with whatever she sends,” said Buddy Emerson, a volunteer showing visitors how maple trees are tapped for the sugar water used in making syrup.

“They’ll come more in the snow than any time, even more than pretty weather,” he said.

Saturday’s pouring rain didn’t stop hundreds of people from turning out for pancakes, crafts, music and festivities; and dozens made the trek up the mountain for tree-
tapping demonstrations.

“This is the first festival [of the season], so it brings everybody out,” said Dean Richardson, who, like Emerson, was dripping wet as he waited for visitors to drive up through the fog to see the 2,500 taps in the maple trees. “The whole community’s out together.”

Another attraction at the festival, which continues today, is the sugar house, where more volunteers explain how hundreds of gallons of sugar water are boiled down into syrup.

“I love the syrup,” said Jan Gambill, of Jefferson, N.C., a native Vermonter who said she made maple syrup the old-fashioned way when she was a child and considers this comparable. “We wanted to see what was up here, and we’re really delighted.”

Gambill’s daughter, Jill Crain, also praised the syrup that’s being sold – along with a lot of other goodies – as a fundraiser for the Mount Rogers Volunteer Fire and Rescue.
“We’re kind of syrup snobs,” Crain said. “We don’t eat Aunt Jemima or anything like that. It’s just sludge to us.”

Kevin Kilby, charter member and original fire chief, said it takes 50 gallons of sugar water to make a gallon of syrup.

“A lot of people call it sap, but it’s not sap,” he said of the sweet liquid that flows in the trees during the freeze and thaw of late winter and early spring. Sap is thicker and comes later, he said. “The encyclopedia calls it sap, so somebody needs to let them and the Internet know that they don’t know it all.”

Kilby said he likes sharing folk traditions with people who might not otherwise be exposed to them, and the fire department holds three festivals each year celebrating local traditions: maple syrup, ramps and sorghum molasses.

“It brings out the flatland foreigners more than it does the local people because the local people know what it’s about,” Kilby said. “You have the people visiting from Bristol, Knoxville, North Carolina. They ain’t never been exposed to something like this, and they love it and we love having them.”

Among those visiting Saturday were members of a youth group from Macedonia Baptist Church in Chilhowie.

“Our little ones are learning about God’s creation,” Sunday school teacher Melissa Thomas said. “So they learned that God provided the trees for the syrup.”

Marlena Phillips, a volunteer serving pancakes Saturday, said traffic had been constant all day – and the economy didn’t appear to be hurting festival attendance.

“It’s the best thing going,” Buryl Greer said of the festival. “Kind of like maple syrup: it’s the best syrup going.”

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What: Whitetop Mountain Maple Festival
When: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. today

EVENTS
* Pancake meal, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Mount Rogers School, $6 for adults and $3.50 for children
* Crafts for sale, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Mount Rogers School
* Storytelling, 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. at Faith Lutheran Church
* Nature slide show, 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. at Faith Lutheran Church
* Whitetop Mountain tapping tour, ongoing 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Whitetop Mountain
* Sugar house tour, ongoing 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the sugar house
* Music, noon to 5 p.m. at the fire hall, admission $5 adults and free under age 12

DIRECTIONS
From Interstate 81 at Exit 19, take U.S. Highway 58 toward and through Damascus; follow the curvy mountain road to the community of Whitetop. From Exit 19, the drive is about 45 minutes.