Sunrise over Mount Guyot 6,624ft, P1,582ft, from Mount le Conte  - photo by the author

Mount Le Conte, Tennessee - a poly-baggers’ mountain

Mount Le Conte is a mecca for poly-baggers. At 6,593 ft and a prominence of 1,360 ft, it ranks as the third highest peak in the state of Tennessee and the third highest in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Six trails ranging from five to nine miles lead to LeConte Lodge (spelled differently than the mountain), an off-road destination that is celebrating its 100th season in 2024. From the earliest years, hikers have kept count of their ascents, and I track these pilgrims at LeContest.com. Sixteen men and one woman have logged or estimated at least 500 climbs, the threshold for the Poly-baggers’ Hall of Fame. The following chapter is an excerpt from LeConte Lodge / A Centennial History of a Smoky Mountain Landmark, by Tom Layton and Mike Hembree, being published by McFarland Books (McFarlandBooks.com). 

The Mountain GOATS of Le Conte

In the 1970s, a retired nurse and an Episcopal pastor made headlines in their rivalry to see who could climb Mount Le Conte the most. Gracie McNicol (1891-1991) made 244 ascents, 155 on foot plus 89 on horseback after she suffered a stroke, finishing on her 92nd birthday in 1983. Rev. Rufus Morgan (1885-1983) made his 174th climb on his 93rd birthday in 1978. He kidded her that he had the most hikes, after subtracting her saddle trips. 

Paul Dinwiddie surpassed them both in 1986, when he wrote in his logbook, “As far as I know, I am the first park visitor to hike Mt. Le Conte 300 times. Nearest to me is Margaret Stevenson with 249 trips.” Dinwiddie retired with 750 and Stevenson with 718.

Their records would be trampled by the next generation: Ron Valentine with about 3,000 and Ed Wright 1,310.  Wright (1925-2009), a mechanical engineer at the famous Oak Ridge National Laboratory, developed mtleconte.com, where he posted his trip reports and the hiking records of his peers. He published his journals in a book, More Than 1,001 Hikes to Mount LeConte. Yet he never knew for sure how he measured up against Valentine, whom he called “a mountain goat”—years before “GOAT” came to mean “Greatest Of All Time.” 

Their paths crossed frequently, including Wright’s final summit hike in October 2008. “I asked him about his total hikes,” Wright wrote. “My hearing is marginal at best, but I think that he said that he had made 798 hikes to LeConte since January 1, 2000. I think he said that he had about 3,000 hikes before that. I asked him when he was going to come clean and tell the world of his accomplishments. He replied that he would give the number after I died. I told him that I was not half dead yet.” Wright died in 2009, and Valentine continued summiting until 2015.  Valentine wasn’t just being modest. He couldn’t be certain about his total, having lost decades of records in a 1999 fire. His post-fire journals document 1,250 ascents, so a lifetime total over 3,000 would be a conservative estimate.

Valentine and Wright specialized in day hikes up the Alum Cave Bluff Trail. In fact, Wright never spent the night at the lodge. His daughter said that was partly because he was frugal, but mostly because he preferred to sleep in his own bed.

In 1991, as Wright turned 66, he “decided to set a mark for hiking Mount Le Conte in one calendar year, which would only be broken by someone with lots of determination”—and he climbed the mountain 230 times. That’s more than double Valentine’s best year, 113 in one of his lost years in the 1990s.

To make the most of the long drive from Oak Ridge into the Smokies, Wright made two or more laps in a day 125 times. “Ed was tough as nails,” Valentine said.

Born in the same year, that Paul Adams welcomed the first paying guests on Mount Le Conte, Wright climbed Le Conte for 160 consecutive months and kept that streak alive even in 1999 when he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. He hiked up on April Fool’s Day, then went into the hospital to have five bypasses and a mitral valve replacement, and he was back on the summit in six weeks. 

Valentine usually hiked on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and holidays, starting at dawn and finishing in four hours so he could be in his real-estate office in the afternoon. He carefully tracked his mileage in his journal, which totals 27,000 trail miles hiked since 2000—enough to circle the globe!

Valentine and Wright are among six men who climbed Le Conte more than a thousand times. Lecontest.com lists 86 men and 23 women with at least 100 summits at the end of 2023. McNicol and Morgan have been squeezed out of the Top 20 among Le Conte’s most prolific climbers.

Jack Huff (1903-1985) kept count of his trips when he built the lodge, and a 1937 story in The Knoxville News-Sentinel credited him with 1,043 climbs. By the time journalist Ernie Pyle visited the lodge in 1940, Huff said he had lost count. Assuming that Huff maintained the same pace through 1949 and continued occasional trips in the 1950s (while he operated the family hotel in Gatlinburg and his wife managed the lodge), it’s safe to estimate that he climbed the mountain close to 2,500 times.

Tim Line, who had the longest tenure of any lodge manager when he retired in 2018, estimates he made 1,500 climbs, averaging a trip per week for 41 years.

Alan Householder, who worked 20 years as llama wrangler and also worked stints on the crew, estimated over 1,200 trips. He averaged 40 miles per week in his heyday. 

Graham “Cracker” Dinwiddie Cooper (1929-2013), a farmer from Greenback, Tenn., told Wright in 1994 that he had about 1,000 climbs but he did not keep an exact count. He continued hiking frequently through 2002.

Dave Scanlon (1936-2014) made weekly climbs and was approaching a thousand before cancer stopped him at age 78, after 982 climbs. Dave’s first ascent in 1966 coincided with the last climb by Harvey Broome, the Knoxville lawyer who was a co-founder of the Wilderness Society and helped write the 1964 Wilderness Act.

Paul Dinwiddie's total of 750 ascents ranks third in his family, compared to his son David Dinwiddie with about 800 and his cousin Cracker Cooper over 1,000. David worked several seasons on the lodge crew. David and his brother Wally were with Paul when he died at age 80 in 1995. As their dad exhaled his last breath, they inhaled. The next day, they climbed Le Conte. “We carried his soul back to the mountain,” David said.

Margaret Stevenson was 48 when she first climbed Le Conte, and she counted 718 ascents at age 84 when she retired from the mountain because of fading eyesight. The year she turned 79, she made 78 climbs. She was the first female member of the 900 Club, hiking every mile of trails in the park, a feat since duplicated by several members of her Wednesday Hikers group. The thrifty daughter of missionaries who served in China, Margaret hiked in sneakers until friends bought her a pair of hiking boots, which were bronzed and are displayed at the lodge.

Stan Wullschleger, also from Oak Ridge, counted 570 climbs as of 2018 and set the speed record with a 46-minute ascent of Alum Cave Bluff Trail. His horizons are not limited to the Smokies, as he has also climbed all 57 of the 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado.

Al Bedinger joined the lodge crew in the 1970s and became the de facto historian of the lodge. He counted 552 hikes as of 2023, and his fellow crewman Richard Ketelle would have a comparable total if he had kept count.

Henry Neel, a veteran of the Iraq war who has worked 25 seasons at the lodge, estimates close to 600 ascents.

Paul Adams (1901-1985), the co-founder of the lodge, hiked up in 1975 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the lodge and closed his era with 523 ascents.

Herrick Brown, the lodge manager between the Huff eras, made an estimated 500 trips.

Wiley Oakley, a famous hiking guide known as the 'Roamin' Man of the Smokies', was born at the base of Mount Le Conte. He had estimated he climbed the mountain more than 500 times before his death in 1954. 

John Northrup, the current lodge manager has made a total of 504 ascents at the time of writing. 

Recently crossing the 500 threshold have been Dr. Ed Jones, a physician for the Veterans Administration in Knoxville, in 2023; and Larry Russell, an 80-year-old retired policeman, in 2024.  

Mount Rush More

Has any other mountain been climbed so frequently by so many? Mountain-climbing records are inherently hard to document, but websites devoted to “peak-baggers” list few hikers as relentless as the pilgrims of Le Conte.

The de facto US national champions are from Phoenix, Arizona.  A Holocaust survivor named Sam Wagman claimed 34,000 ascents of 2,706 ft, P1,334 ft Camelback Mountain—three times a day, six days a week, from 1975 through 2012, when he turned 75. Also on Camelback Sandy Kloch counted 10,000 ascents.  On nearby Piestewa Peak 2,606 ft, P1,176 ft, Nick Palmares had 6,000.

There are also at least three men with more than a thousand climbs of Grand Monadnock, a 3,166 ft, P2,186 ft peak in New Hampshire, where Henry David Thoreau once enjoyed the panoramic view of Boston, 60 miles southeast.  By the end of 2023, the rocky trail has been trod 7,659 times by Larry Davis, a pony-tailed Florida native who went nearly eight years without missing a day—climbing Grand Monadnock on 2,850 consecutive days.  Coming up behind Larry is Fran Rautiola with 6,180 ascents at the end of the same year.

Anyone who has hiked to Le Conte Lodge (10.4 miles roundtrip via Alum Cave, gaining 2,763 feet) might scoff at Camelback (3.8 miles, 1,280 feet) or Monadnock (4.4 miles, 1,715 feet). 

In the same way, Colorado hikers might look down on Le Conte.  Most of the state’s famed “14ers” require climbs over 3,000 feet.  Pikes Peak 14,109 ft, P5,525 ft via the Barr Trail gains 7,500 feet with the round-trip mileage of a marathon. The lifetime record on Pikes Peak is 985 ascents by Edwin Paget, an eccentric professor who liked to be called “History’s Most Significant Man.”

In the western United States, it’s not uncommon to find hikers who have repeated the same hike hundreds of times.  At the end of 2023, John Kirk had 1,040 trips up Stafford Hogback 6,487 ft, P482 ft, and his wife Alyson had 1,039 on Green Mountain 8144 ft, P524 ft.

Mount Fuji 12,388 ft, P12,388 ft in Japan requires a climb of at least 5,000 feet over four miles—substantially steeper than any trail on Le Conte. A Japanese proverb says, “A wise man will climb Mount Fuji once; a fool will climb Fuji twice.” Jitsukawa Yoshinobu, born during World War II, has been Fuji’s fool more than 2,000 times, including an annual record of 248 trips—18 more than Wright’s best year on Le Conte.