Poteat
The late Jack Dean is shown on the trail in a white shirt and tie back in the 1980s. Jack served as manager of the Kimbrell’s Furniture Store in Morganton for many years.
Fear of heights has no place on the Blue Trail across the peaks of Grandfather Mountain.
For years before I knew the man, I had watched Jack Dean as he walked to work each morning up Collett Street, passing right in front of my editor’s office window.
He was always impeccably dressed, wearing a suit with a dress shirt, a sharply knotted tie, and hard-sole leather dress shoes of the type that businessmen — including myself — used to favor.
I did not know it until later, but Jack’s home was just below the intersection of College and Collett streets, and he was headed to the downtown Kimbrell’s Furniture store where he served as manager for many years.
Jack made that trek on foot each day no matter the weather, walking with a purposeful stride up the hill whether it was a sunny October morning or a day of freezing drizzle in February.
And then one day, Jack didn’t walk on up the hill toward downtown. Instead, he came into The News Herald offices and asked to speak with me.
He had retired from Kimbrell’s, he told me, and now wanted to fulfill a dream he had long held — to be a weekly columnist for The News Herald.
As we talked, it was obvious that Jack read The News Herald carefully each day and from cover to cover. Years of managing a downtown business had also left him with a wealth of insight about just how Morganton worked.
And, as I reviewed the sample columns he had brought me, it was obvious, too, that he was an excellent writer, mixing his knowledge of Morganton with a sly and understated sense of humor.
When Jack walked out the door after 45 minutes or so, a partnership — and a friendship — began that would stretch for more than 11 years and would end only when Jack succumbed to cancer in the spring of 1996.
I soon learned, as did Burke County readers, that Jack was an avid outdoorsman who loved to hike in the Blue Ridge and who possessed a boundless knowledge of every tree, flower, mushroom, and animal that called the mountains home.
My favorite columns from Jack were those that he wrote about hiking trails that he had explored, giving lots of detail about views, obstacles, and just how challenging each trail was.
It was from one of Jack’s columns, written and published in the late summer of 1987, that I first became acquainted with what was then a private trail system spanning the peaks of Grandfather Mountain.
In particular, that column focused on the Blue Trail, which traverses the ridgeline of Grandfather Mountain, beginning at the parking lot for the Swinging Bridge, then heading north across MacRae Peak and Attic Window Peak before ending atop Calloway Peak.
The trail is just a little more than 2 miles long, making for an out-and-back distance of just over 4 miles. Four miles that can take even an experienced hiker five to six hours to complete. For a novice, add more time.
Like most trails that actually follow a mountain ridgeline, the trail is rough, rocky, and rooty. Care is required in the placement of every footstep. Twisted ankles loom around every curve.
In some sections, the track is so steep that cables have been installed to help hikers pull themselves up. In sections that are steeper still, wooden ladders are attached to the rock faces.
If memory serves, four of those ladders are positioned on the side of MacRae Peak. Novice hikers have been known to freeze here, paralyzed by fear of falling and by the simple altitude of the location, with the valley thousands of feet below.
Jack loved that trail and hiked it at every opportunity even though he was advancing into his 70s. And my brother Johnny and I, first spurred by Jack’s column, hiked it even more than he did.
We hiked it in the winter, when less foolish men would have been home by the fire rather than inching their way down the ice-covered backside of MacRae Peak.
We hiked it in the summer, enduring the blazing sun while scrambling hand over hand up the narrow, rock-filled chasm that leads to Attic Widow Peak.
And we hiked it in the fall and spring, celebrating the changing of the seasons, and reveling in the views that stretched across the Piedmont all the way to the towering office buildings of downtown Charlotte.
Sometime in the early ’90s, before his diagnosis with cancer, Jack wrote a poignant column for which I penned the simple headline, “Farewell to the Blue.”
In the column, Jack admitted to himself and his readers that his eyesight, his balance, and his physical strength were no longer what they had been.
The Blue, he wrote, is, for all its beauty and splendor, a harsh and unforgiving mistress. A mistake upon that mountain treadway can lead, in an instant, to serious injury or death.
He would, he concluded sadly, hike the Blue no more.
Jack has been gone for more than 30 years now. At my last visit to his home before his death, he gave me his new hiking boots, barely worn, and several pairs of sturdy hiking socks.
I wore them for years.
And I hiked the Blue many times in those boots.
But a lot of years have now passed.
The young man who was 29 the first day Jack Dean walked into his office is nearly 71 now.
His eyesight, his sense of balance, and his strength are also not what they used to be.
And, like my friend Jack some 35 years ago, I too must now say, “Farewell to the Blue.”
