The Pancake-Ready Paradise

BLUE GRASS, Va. There was something in the smoke, as Ivan Puffenbarger's sugarhouse burned and the volunteer firefighters roared over the mountains trying to save it. In the ash and plastic fumes, there was a smell like molasses dripping on a stove burner.

Seven hundred gallons of maple syrup was on fire.

"Sugar just burns like wild," said Elmer Waybright, chief of the Highland County Volunteer Fire Department. When his crew arrived, they could see canisters inside blowing their lids off and the syrup boiling out on fire like lava. "We had to back out and just let it go," he said.

That fire, a year ago this week, brought a moment of decision to the heart of Virginia's maple syrup country. The Allegheny Mountains cursed Highland with isolation but blessed it with a combination of weather, soil and sugar maples, creating an island of New England south of the Potomac River.

This place, with its snowy forests and sugarhouses full of sweetened steam, can seem eternal to outsiders. But at the time of the fire, there were already worries about its future: Syrupmakers were aging, young people weren't interested, climate change was shifting the freeze-and-thaw cycles that cue the trees.

And then, to top it off, one of the county's biggest producers saw his entire operation turn to sugar-smelling ash.

The question, for the man and the county, was: Now what?

"I told the wife," said Puffenbarger, 71. "I said, 'I'm going to put her back.' "

With a lot of help, he did.

Highland County, about 180 miles southwest of the Capital Beltway, is the emptiest in Virginia, and one of the emptiest in any state east of the Mississippi. Its 2,400 residents are reachable only by switchback roads over mountain knobs, living in towns like Monterey and McDowell and small settlements like Possum Trot. If Washington were as lightly peopled as Highland is, its population would be smaller than the House of Representatives.

What Highland has is maple trees. And mountain winters that work them like a turkey baster.

On subfreezing nights, the trees draw water up through their roots. On warmer days, the sweetened sap runs down -- and out, through taps drilled in the trunk.