Off-season updates

 During the winter of 2020, we heard updates from Ron Underwood with #431, John Northrup #240, Tim Webb #175, Bonnie Northrup #160-plus, Janice Charleville #102, and Kemp Stonehouse #100-plus.
 From the journals of Paul Dinwiddie, I was able to document #141 for Ernest Luallen, who suffered a fatal heart attack at Arch Rock in 1992. On summitpost.org, I found Steve Prosseda with #101 in 2019.

It was a mild winter by Le Conte standards

Several of Le Conte's most relentless climbers braved knee-deep snow for this rare Leap Day photo-op, including Adam Gravett #62, Timothy Massey #57, Chris Maulden #57, Philip Clarkson #55, and Adam Ozment #39. (Photo by Adam Gravett)

3.5 degrees on Leap Day (photo by Chris Maulden)

 Spring arrived early—Thursday, March 19, thanks to the extra Leap Day—to end a mild winter atop Mount Le Conte.

 Snowfall was unusually light. Blame mist opportunities: Winter brought 40 inches of rain—enough to make 30 feet of powder. Had it been colder, we might have broken the 2000 record of 164 inches of snow. Average snowfall is 82 inches, but this past winter saw just 39.9 inches. 
 Since the start of spring, another 11 inches of snow has been measured at the Lodge, bringing the total to 51.1 inches. That included two inches on Mother's Day weekend—the seventh time since 1978 Le Conte has had snow on Mothers Day.

 This past winter was the first time Le Conte Lodge has not had a sub-zero night, according to 42 years of weather records. The coldest temperature in 2020 was 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit on the night of Jan. 21. That was the 35th anniversary of the alltime-record of minus-32 in 1985.

➤Here is a link for weather at 2,010 meters atop Mount Le Conte. 

Wrapping February in a 10-inch blanket (photo by Adam Gravett)

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."

Old-timers hiked Le Conte up to 15 days in a row

 In 2020, we have had a few hikers make back-to-back climbs of Mount Le Conte: Linten Atkins Oct. 3-4, Bill Yeadon July 2-3-4, Timothy Massey March 8-9, and Adam Gravett Feb. 28-29. 
 So what's the record for consecutive days climbing the mountain? 

Paul Dinwiddie on Little Duckhawk Ridge
(Photo by Dr. Ed Jones)

 In Ed Wright's journals, he said in October 2002 that his friend Tillroe Smith from Moody, Ala., had hiked to the Lodge for 15 consecutive days. Wright gave no other details. Smith ranks 17th on our honor roll with at least 345 summit hikes through 2006.
 Smith often made the hike more than once a day. Wright records that Smith twice made seven trips in seven days in the fall of 1999, plus eight trips in a week in the spring of 1999.
 Paul Dinwiddie hiked up the Alum Cave Bluff trail 11 straight days in 1991, July 16-26. In his journal, he doesn't tell us much about the experience, except to say that he went dancing at the O'Connor Center the night after the final hike.

 Dinwiddie was 75 at the time. He climbed Le Conte 102 times in 1991 on his way to his lifetime total of 750, which ranks 9th all-time.
 Wright met Dinwiddie during the 11th hike and told him: "Heavy exercise every day is not good for you. Should have a day of rest every other day."

 1991 was an epic year for climbing Le Conte. That was also when Wright, at age 66, set his one-year record of 230 climbs. (He also had 90 ascents in 1992, 107 in 1993, 104 in 1994, 103 in 1995, 90 in 1996, 130 in 1997, and 111 in 1998). Wright often climbed two or three times in a single day, but heeding his own advice, he rarely hiked on consecutive days.

 Also in 1991: Shirley Henry hiked the mountain seven straight days Sept. 5-11, according to Dinwiddie's journal. Shirley was hurrying toward her 100th hike that October. We have her on the honor roll with at least 173 lifetime climbs.
 Margaret Stevenson, at age 79, climbed five consecutive days Sept. 19-23, 1991. She hiked her age in 1991 with 88 summit hikes, including #500 on Oct. 15.

 More recently, in July of 2012, Mick Meister climbed the Rainbow Falls trail five consecutive days while training for a trip to Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro.

#100by100? Looking for totals from the early 2000s

 Bill Yeadon's #75by75 goal got me thinking about the upcoming centennial of Le Conte Lodge. What's the chance that by 2026, the Le Conte Log honor roll could hit #100by100, with a hundred hikers over 100 climbs?

Ron Valentine has climbed Mount Le Conte
more than anyone else, with about 4,000 trips
since his first hike at age 13 on July 4, 1946.
 He is pictured with Teri Samples.

 As of April 1, 2020, I have documented 74 hikers who have climbed the mountain at least 100 times. I know of a few others that I am still trying to verify. I have a hunch that the late James "Pop" Hollandsworth of Asheville belongs on the list, and I hope to research his journals as soon as possible.
 Several other hikers are closing in on 100. Yeadon, Sandy Martin, Pamela Lewis Barrs, John D. Williams, and Melissa Coatney have all expressed goals of #100.
 Adam Gravett made 39 climbs in 2019 to raise his total to 59. If he keeps that pace, he'll be well past 100 by 2025. Timothy Massey has a goal of 20 ascents in 2020, which would get him to 72. 
 If all those come through, we'll be close to 90 climbers with 100 hikes by 2025. I suspect there are more that I haven't yet identified. There is a four-year gap between my research (started in 2012) and the exhaustive hiking journal of Ed Wright (whose last last summit hike was in 2008). 

—Tom Layton / LeConteLog@gmail.com

Terra Incognita: Untangling the Le Conte name

On this 1863 map, Mount Le Conte was still labeled as Bullhead. The name is hard to read over the terrain. Look closely above the K in SMOKY. The names for Clingmans Dome, Mount Mingus, Mount Guyot, Laurel Top, Snow Bird Mountain, and Max Patch were already settled by this time.

Joseph Le Conte in 1875

 When Marty Polk signed in at LeConte Lodge on Oct. 2, 2019, she left an intriguing comment in the logbook, identifying herself as a "distant niece of Joseph Le Conte."
 Joseph Le Conte was the namesake of Mount Le Conte, according to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. However, he made no such claim in his autobiography, which casts doubts on the the government registry. We know that Joseph was not shy about putting his name on mountains, because his book uses the caption Le Conte Dome for Yosemite's South Dome, which is now known as Mount Starr King. (Thomas Starr King was a Unitarian preacher who was instrumental in the movement to establish Yosemite National Park.)
 The Tennessee mountain we call Le Conte was known as Walasi'yi or Mylegony to the Cherokee and Bullhead to early settlers, until Princeton professor Arnold Guyot renamed it sometime after his 1859 and 1860 expeditions to measure the Great Smoky Mountains. In hindsight, it appears that Guyot intended to honor Joseph's older brother, Professor John Le Conte. See this footnote by Ken Wise in the book Terra Incognita: An Annotated Bibliography of the Great Smoky Mountains.

 While Guyot, Samuel Buckley, and Gen. Thomas Clingman explored the mountaintops of the Smokies, the scientifically trained Le Conte brothers were supposedly responsible for monitoring a stationary barometer in Waynesville, N.C., that was used to calibrate the summit measurements. 
 Apparently, Joseph was elsewhere. In his autobiography, Joseph never mentions Waynesville, Bullhead, nor the expeditions of Guyot, Buckley, and Clingman. He respected Professor Guyot on an academic level and described him as "a lifelong friend," so if he had been involved in this project, he certainly would have mentioned it. 
 In 1858, at age 35, Joseph wrote that he climbed "Black Mountain (Mount Mitchell)*, the highest peak in the Appalachians, 6,710 feet high." If it was a clear day, he might have seen Bullhead 66 miles west. If not, then he probably never laid eyes on the mountain that made him famous. Since he spent the summer of 1858 in the N.C. mountains, it is possible that he had a role in Buckley's survey, which measured Bullhead at 6,670 feet.

John Le Conte

 In 1859, Guyot measured Bullhead at 6,613, missing the modern standard of 6,593 by just 20 feet. Meanwhile, Joseph Le Conte said he spent most of that year in Columbia, S.C.
 The Le Conte brothers were from a Hugenot family who fled from France because of religious persecution. John Le Conte (1818-1891) and Joseph Le Conte (1823-1901) were raised on a rice plantation in coastal Georgia. Both graduated from Franklin College (the forerunner of the University of Georgia) and earned MD's in New York. They taught at South Carolina College during the Civil War era and moved west in 1869, when John became the first president of the University of California.
 Joseph became a professor of geology and was a charter member of the Sierra Club along with his friend John Muir. You'll find Joseph's name on 13,930-foot Mount Le Conte in California, the Le Conte Glacier in Alaska, and Le Conte Falls in Yosemite. Because he was a slaveowner, his name was removed in 2016 from Yosemite's Le Conte Memorial Lodge (now known as the Yosemite Conservation Heritage Center.
 His son Joseph Nisbet Le Conte (1870-1950) succeeded Muir as president of the Sierra Club in 1915 and was noted for his maps and photographs, which caught the eye of Ansel Adams.

Le Conte means "the tale." The Le Conte brothers usually spelled their name with a space, which is how Mount Le Conte is labeled on USGS topographic maps and registered with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. However, the space is often omitted in modern usage, such as the name of Tennessee's LeConte Lodge. I've chosen to keep the space in the name of this blog.

* The name of Mount Mitchell was not settled until after Dr. Elisha Mitchell was buried on the summit in 1858. The official elevation is now 6,684 feet. Dr. Mitchell measured it in 1835 at 6,476—proving that North Carolina outranked New Hampshire (Mount Washington was listed as 6,234 then and 6,288 now) as the highest point in the eastern U.S.

A busy year for our most popular national park

 The Great Smoky Mountains National Park set a record for the number of visitors with 12.55 million in 2019, according to the National Park Service. That's up by 1.13 million since 2018. Much of the increase is attributed to the long-awaited opening of the "Missing Link" on the Foothills Parkway. 
 Among the 62 national parks, the Great Smokies led the Grand Canyon (5.97 million, down 0.41), Rocky Mountain (4.67, up 0.08), Zion (4.48, up 0.16), Yellowstone (4.02, down 0.09), Yosemite (4.42, up 0.41), Acadia (3.44, down 0.10), Grand Teton (3.41, down 0.08), and Olympic (3.24, up 0.14).
 If you include national monuments, parkways, and all 418 units in the National Park system, the most popular in 2019 were the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (15.00 million, down 0.22 from 2018), the Blue Ridge Parkway (14.97, up 0.28), the Great Smokies (12.55), the St. Louis Gateway Arch (9.40, up 0.16), the Lincoln Memorial (7.81, up 0.01), and Lake Mead/Hoover Dam (7.5 million, down 0.08). The Blue Ridge Parkway holds the all-time record with 21.54 million visits in 2002.
 The report includes a category for Concessioner Lodging, which in the Smokies represents the number of overnight guests at LeConte Lodge. That total for 2019 was 10,955, down 208 from 2018. Compare that to the 12 million who visited the Smokies, and those of us who stayed at the Lodge are one in a thousand.

Le Stonehenge: The dawn of 2020

The dawn of 2020, as photographed from Myrtle Point by Chris Maulden. In a Stonehenge alignment, the sun rose in the notch of Deep Gap south of Cold Mountain, 37 miles east/southeast. That's Cold Mountain just to the left of the sun, and the horizon to the right includes Shining Rock, Black Balsam, Richland Balsam, and Waterrock Knob. The silhouetted ridge just below the sunrise is the Jumpoff and Mount Kephart.

Welcome to the Century Club, Linten Atkins

The Lodge is closed for winter, but that didn't stop Linten Atkins

 Linten Atkins of Newport, Tenn., climbed Mount Le Conte more than a dozen times in 2019, and on New Year's Eve he hiked up the Bullhead Trail and celebrated his 100th trip to the mountaintop.

 Linten is the 71st hiker with 100 lifetime hikes documented on the Le Conte Log honor roll. Others who reached the milestone in 2019 are Steve Odom, Gary White, Jeff Wadley, and Smoky Mountains Hiking Club president Brian Worley.
 Linten, 65, is the manager of the water system for the town of Newport.

Fastest known time for the Tour de Le Conte

Luke Bollschweiler averaged over 5 mph on a 47.5-mile route that climbed 11,086 feet

 Congratulations to Luke Bollschweiler of Maryville, Tennessee, who ran the six trails of Mount LeConte on Dec. 27 with the fastest known time for the Tour de Le Conte.
 Luke covered 47.5 miles in 8 hours, 35 minutes, and 34 seconds. Starting at 7 a.m., he went up Rainbow Falls, down Trillium Gap, up Bullhead, and down Alum Cave. After a car shuttle to Newfound Gap, he went up the Boulevard, and down Brushy Mountain to finish in mid-afternoon. The previous record was 10:03:41 by Dave Worth in 2011. 
 It was the second time Luke has broken one of Dave's records. This past March, he ran the 72 miles of the Appalachian Trail through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 14:28:33, which was 22 minutes faster than Worth did it in 2011. That race is called the Smokies Challenge Adventure Run. A video crew followed his trek and produced a film called "Ultra Man."

 According to an interview last year in the Maryville Daily Times, Luke and his wife Sarah moved to Tennessee in 2000 when he took a job in Maryville. He grew up in Idaho and went to Brigham Young University in Utah.
 This was the 12th time in 2019 (and the 36th time since 1993) that the Tour de Le Conte has been successfully completed in 24 hours. Luke is also the first to complete the Tour in daylight. Most completers have done at least two of the trails in the dark. 
 The list of completers is on the sidebar of this blog, below the Le Conte Honor Roll. If you are reading on your phone, you will need to switch to "View Web Version" to see the sidebar. You can also click on the "Tour de Le Conte" tab on our masthead to read previous stories about the Tour.