Jack Huff is a mountain man. All of his 30-odd years have been spent
here in the Smokies. And for 17 of those years he has been the
entrepreneur at the top of Mt. Le Conte.
He owns the Le Conte Lodge. Seven months of the year he feeds and beds
and maybe entertains the hikers and horsemen who come up the trail.
Jack Huff was just out of high school when he first came to the top of
Mt. Le Conte, and he had visions of building a mountaintop tent camp for
hiking vacationers. That was long before there was even a horse trail up
here. Everything that came up had to come on men’s backs.
Today three pack horses arrive every afternoon loaded with supplies, and
the lodge consists of a whole row of cabins, and two small log lodges,
and a big house for the Huffs’ own living quarters. And Jack is still
building.
Jack Huff seems timid at first, but he really enjoys talking to people
if he likes them. They say he can size up a new arrival in ten seconds.
If the new arrival is a heel, Jack Huff is polite but his conversation
becomes a minimum.
Few vacationers can out-think this product of the Smokies. He listens
nightly to the radio news; he absorbs scores of passionate orations on
world affairs from his guests before the big fireplace; he reads the
papers and magazines.
He is a man of many abilities, too. He builds his own cabins, he has a
flair for architecture; construction is his hobby. And he weaves. On the
big loom in the dining room he has woven all the lovely curtains for the
lodge windows.
He got his weaving, among other things, from the Pi Phi Settlement
School down in Gatlinburg. That is a school founded 28 years ago by the
college sorority, to bring a better education to the mountaineers.
Pretty Pi Phis come from all over to teach there.
A girl named Pauline Whaling came down from the north, to teach the
mountaineers. She was out of Monmouth College in Illinois, and
Northwestern University.
But whether she taught, or got taught, I can’t quite decide. For she
married Jack Huff, and came to the mountain with him. And when their
little boy was born, he came to the mountain too—a husky, tow headed
example of a good life.
For seven years Pauline Whaling has been on the mountain, working with
her own hands, helping run things. She is beautiful in her heavy boots
and leather jacket.
She leaps around the terrace of the lodge like a gazelle. She was up at
4 this morning to see Jack off on an early trip down the mountain. She
herself has hiked the tough eight-mile Newfound Gap trail in two hours
flat. She is bountifully happy. “Up here is peace,” she says.
A mountaineer’s strength is in his heart, and not necessarily in a big
body. Jack Huff weighs only 150 pounds, and stands sort of folded up
with his hands in his pockets. But his walking feats are astounding.
He has walked 15,000 miles up and down this mountainside. He kept count
of his round trips until three years ago, and at that time they had
passed 1000. It is seven miles each way, and exactly a mile gained in
altitude.
He has often made two round trips in one day, packing great loads up the
trail on his back. There are some mighty men in these mountains. Listen
to this story:
Andy Huff is Jack’s father. He owns the big Mountain View Hotel down in
Gatlinburg. He has lived down there for 40 years, but he has never seen
his son’s lodge up here, although it’s only two hours by horseback. “I
just haven’t got time to go,” says Andy Huff.
But Jack’s mother saw Le Conte Lodge before she died. She made one trip.
Just one. That trip sounds like a legend, but it’s true. She came up on
her son’s back.
It was 14 years ago. Mrs. Huff was a semi-invalid. She wanted to see the
sunset from the peak before she died.
So Jack made a light wooden chair. He put arms on it for her, and a
board rest for her feet. He put her in it; they lifted her onto his
back, and ran the straps over his shoulders. Mrs. Huff weighed 90
pounds. In her lap she carried a kitten.
Jack Huff, packing his mother on his back, made those seven miles to the
top of Mt. Le Conte in exactly five hours. He stopped only a few times,
and that was for his mother to rest, rather than him. “She’s the only
person who ever came up the mountain backwards,” he says. They still
talk about it with awe around Gatlinburg.
Mrs. Huff stayed a week on the mountain, in a tent. But it rained all
the time. She never saw the sunset. Finally the dampness became too much
for her. One afternoon Jack wrapped her in a raincoat, put her into her
chair, and packed her back down the mountain.
Soon after that he started building a log cabin for her, so she would
have a drier place to stay the next time. But she didn’t live to see it.
That old cabin is the original house of today’s Le Conte Lodge. Jack
would like to keep it, for sentiment. But he says it isn’t built right,
and soon it will have to come down.