In print for the first time in fifty years, Mount Le Conte is a reissue of the important 1966 self-published memoir by Paul J. Adams (1901-1985), a well-known Tennessee naturalist and the first custodian of the Smoky Mountain’s majestic summit in the years before the area was declared a national park.
Appointed custodian of Mount Le Conte in 1925 by the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association, Adams went to work immediately and spent a year making the camp suitable for overnight visitors. Mount Le Conte, a massive mile-high formation extending five miles from the main divide of the Great Smoky Mountains, with its rugged landscapes, rushing streams, and fecund forests, was considered a prime showplace in efforts to establish the Smokies as a national park.
In addition to an extensive introduction, the editors have augmented the original text of Mount Le Conte with several photographs and sketches gleaned from Adams’s personal papers, resulting in a fuller, more complete reconstruction of Adams’s role in establishing the camp that would later come to be known as Le Conte Lodge.
An important source on the fascinating history of Mount Le Conte in the pre-Park era, this book is a companion to the recently published
Smoky Jack: The Adventures of a Dog and his Master on Mount Le Conte
(University of Tennessee Press, 2016). ANNE BRIDGES AND KEN WISE are co-directors of the Great Smoky Mountains Regional Project and coeditors, with Russell Clement, of
Terra Incognita: An Anno­tated Bibliography of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1544-1934.
Bridges is an associ­ate professor at the John C. Hodges Library at the University of Tennessee. Wise is a professor at the John C. Hodges Library, author of
Hiking Trails of the Great Smoky Mountains,
and co-author of
A Natural History of Mount Le Conte.