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.
GATLINBURG, Tenn., Oct. 29, 1940—
Yesterday afternoon, while Jack Huff and I were sitting in front of the fireplace at the top of Mt. Le Conte, a couple of weary strangers came around the corner of the lodge.
They asked for succor—for a night’s lodging and a spot of food and a touch of bandage for sore heels—and they got it, in good Smoky Mountain fashion.
They turned out to be two of the nicest strangers who ever came to a mountaintop. They were Cleveland business men, out on a vacation trip. One was John F. Wilson, white-haired general manager of the Equity Savings & Loan Co. The other was Carr Liggett, who has his own advertising agency.