Maple Festival in March

Every March, Highland County, VA, has a maple festival.
http://www.highlandcounty.org/maple.htm
Who knew you could make maple syrup this far south? Apparently, Highland County is at a high enough elevation that sugar maples do just fine there.

At one place we visited, syrup is made the old-fashioned way by boiling in pans. The steam from the boiling process exits through vents in the roof:



Other places use more modern methods (reverse osmosis).

Here's the old-fashioned way of collecting sap from the sugar maples:

And the modern way (looks much less appealing to me):


A view of a grove of the maple trees. The big box at the bottom of the hill is where they collect the sap using the modern method of tubes- the whole systems is gravity-fed.