Examples from the maple museum's exhibits include a wooden carved mold (left) used to form large blocks of maple candy and a hand-carved wooden ladle.

A tag marks the hole where a tap line is located on a sugar maple in Everett Rexrode's orchard.

Sheep graze among the sugar maple trees on Everett Rexrode's sugar maple orchard in Hightown.

Bottles of maple syrup are sold, often as souvenirs, at the H&H Cash Store in Monterey. The store was built in 1903 and bought by the Herold Family in 1958.

Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

The Maple Museum in Highland County houses self-guided exhibits on the evolution of maple syrup making.

MONTEREY -- Ah, Highland County in August. What could be sweeter?

Postcard-pretty mountains, lush green valleys and the highest mean elevation east of the Mississippi River all add up to a cool and refreshing late summer getaway. Why, last Wednesday the temperature only got up to -- .

Excuse me? What's that you say?

Oh.

Well, yes, this is supposed to be a story about the Highland Maple Museum.

And it's a very nice museum, too, with exhibits on maple syrup-making through the years, beginning with the Indians and leading right up to modern times.

The only thing is -- it's kind of small.

In fact, it's just a sort of rustic cabin, located outside the lovely alpine town of Monterey on U.S. 220.

"It's almost a shed," said Carolyn Pohowsky almost apologetically. Pohowsky is executive director of the Highland County Chamber of Commerce, which owns and more or less runs the maple museum.

But it's really a self-service kind of a place, open to visitors at all hours. At certain times of the year, those visitors are primarily animals. Especially birds -- who like to build their nests in the exhibits.

"The door stays open all the time," said Pohowsky, who checks up on the museum now and then and cleans out the birds' nests, if she can reach them.

No doubt she would also change the light bulbs, if the museum had any lights.

Pohowsky, by the way, used to speak Arabic and has lived in the Middle East, the Netherlands and Malaysia, among other places. The short answer to what she is doing in Highland County is she was born near here, and came home.

But then again, who wouldn't want to be in Highland County, especially in August?

OK, let's be honest: We cannot in all honesty guarantee that everybody will find the quaint little Highland Maple Museum by itself worth the two-hour-plus drive from Roanoke.

But Highland County most certainly is worth the drive, with its gorgeous scenery, fall-like temperatures -- the temperature at 3 p.m. last Wednesday was 66 degrees, for heaven's sake! -- and Monterey itself. Monterey is the kind of town where one family has owned the general store, the H&H Cash Store, for generations.

Highland County is known to the outside world mostly for its syrup, and for the festival it holds every March to celebrate it. The festival attracts tens of thousands of people -- and probably produces most of the human visitors to the maple museum, Pohowsky said.

Syrup making is an activity usually associated with more Northern climes -- but Highland County is so far up in the air it might as well be in the North, climatewise. Its soaring, old-growth sugar maples produce buckets of maple sap in the winter months, which is converted to syrup and sugar and sold around the state.

It is also sold in Monterey, of course. The H&H Cash Store sells Highland County-made maple syrup almost every day of the week, according to assistant manager Kenny Herold. It also sells maple candy and maple sugar, which is created by further cooking and stirring the syrup until it turns into granules. Herold said they sell to regulars as well as people passing through.

"We tell them to go to the museum," said Herold of the visitors.

"Everybody supports each other" in Highland County, explained Pohowsky.

As for the maple museum, it was built in the early 1980s to replicate an old-time "sugar house," said Pohowsky. The contents were donated by local syrup producers. The exhibits document maple syrup-making back to pre-Colonial times, when the Indians would attach a birch bark cup to a broken sugar maple branch to catch the sweet nectar flowing out. Once the water evaporated, and the insects were shooed away, the syrup was good to go.

Pioneers speeded up the process a bit by cooking the maple sap in iron pots, to get rid of the excess water. It takes 30 to 60 gallons of sugar water from the tree to make a gallon of syrup or 8 pounds of sugar, according to one of the informative signs posted around the museum.

The museum also includes numerous "spiles," which are the thingies stuck into the maple tree to channel the sap out. The Indians used wooden spiles, the pioneers metal ones. Neither hurts the trees very much, which is, of course, easy for us to say -- but some of the maple trees at the Rexrode sugar orchard out in Blue Grass Valley have been around for centuries. They certainly look healthy enough.

There are also examples of the plastic tubing used by modern syrup makers, and a "sap sack," which is a more sanitary way of gathering sap than the old-fashioned buckets. And there is a lovely stained-glass window that depicts a maple tree being tapped, done by artist Jackie Stephenson, and a calming view out the front door of a valley covered with brown grass and purple-blossomed ironweed.

The museum is very quiet.

One thing you realize as you walk around the museum is that maple syrup making hasn't changed all that much in 400 years. It's still largely a matter of gathering the stuff from the trees and then boiling it down. The sap typically begins to run sometime in February, and the farmers must be ready to take advantage of it when that happens, said Pohowsky. "It's like turning on a tap."

During the recent hard winter, however, the sap proved elusive. The heavy snows made it hard to get to the trees when the sap was running, said Pohowsky, and when the snow did melt, the sap stopped.

"It was a challenging year."

She said there's still plenty of maple syrup to sell, however, because the farmers stockpile syrup during good years. You can buy it not only in Highland County but at health food stores around the state.

"Health food stores are very keen to have it," said Pohowsky, who insists maple sugar is better for you than the other kind.

"Most of us who live here don't use white sugar if we can avoid it."