The holy grail of T-shirts

Airlift cargo next to the office. T-shirts on board? (Photo by Melissa Coatney)

 The "I hiked it" T-shirt is the holy grail of the Le Conte pilgrim. It is only sold at the Lodge, so you have to earn it by hiking to the top of the mountain. 
 Actually, you can pick up a classic version for free, assuming you know where to look, you're willing to bushwhack, and you're willing to put up with some stains and critter holes. 

2007 shirt

2009 shirt

 These are T-shirts that were accidentally dropped years ago during the annual airlift to resupply the Lodge. Each March, bundles of T-shirts along with propane tanks and various staples, are packed into cargo nets that are slung below a helicopter and flown from Highway 441 to the mountaintop. At least three times, T-shirts somehow slipped through the nets and were lost in the Smokies. 
 Off-trail hikers sought these T-shirts for years. In December of 2014, Dave Landreth, Ronnie McCall, and Tommy McGlothlin were exploring a rockslide near Anakeesta Ridge when they found some of the 2007 shirts.
 Landreth described the discovery in an interview with the Cub Report, the newsletter of the Great Smoky Mountains Association: "We simply couldn't believe that after all this time, after eight years, and after enduring all of the brutal weather that regularly sweeps this high aerie in the Great Smokies, that we had actually found the mystery shirts and that many of them were still salvageable. Over the years, [the shirts] had become a source of great debate and conjecture and really had become the holy grail." Some of the shirts were still worthy of framing.
 Landreth is on our honor roll with well over 100 summit hikes. He said in a 2014 interview with the Meanderthals blog, "I've hiked the Alum Cave Bluff trail at least one way hundreds of times over the 40-something years I've been hiking in the Smokies." He also estimated that he has climbed at least 40 times off-trail via Huggins Hell. For more about Landreth, read Peter Barr's 2014 story in Blue Ridge Outdoors magazine, "The Edward Abbey of the East."

 Another off-trail hiker, Mike Poppen, said he has found shirts from three miss drops. In 2019, he posted video of the 2007 shirts. "The holy grail of miss drops," he said, "is the legendary story of a red wagon that fell and is stuck in the top of a tall spruce tree somewhere."