That scene, Sandy is certainly one of those cases where I would make two conversions from the original Raw file with different brightness levels then gently combine them as masks using a low opacity soft edged brush to carefully merge the two together without any join showing.
If there was no movement in the trees you could have taken a couple of bracketed exposure shots. But this may produce misalignment if there was any wind rock movement.
Using ACR, I might try setting some negative values for the Whites and Highlights; which could possibly help if working on a single not stacked image. But I don't know if your software allows for these adjustments.