That went on for five minutes. But finally I had to go. So I got up and said, “To hell with you, you lousy little squirrels and birds, you’d probably eat me up if you had a chance.”
Any savage squirrel that attacks me will get the toe of my boot right where he sits down, that’s what he’ll get. No squirrel is going to eat me up. I got up to the top of the mountain without anything else happening.
LE CONTE LODGE, Great Smokies Park, Oct. 28, 1940—
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.