By Debra McCown
Bristol
Herald Courier
March 29, 2009
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.”
http://www.tricities.com/tri/news/local/article/hundreds_turn_out_for_whitetop_mountain_maple_festival/22324/
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