You passed the trail up Huckleberry Knob, the highest point around — a gentle, grassy, blueberry-covered dome with a heavenly view. And on top of that gentle mountain sits a lonely grave, and here is the cold story of how it got there.
It was December of eighteen ninety-nine. Two men — lumbermen, working the timber camps that were stripping these mountains back then — set out on foot to walk across the high country toward Robbinsville. One of them we know by name: Andy Sherman. And somewhere up on that open, treeless knob, the weather turned on them the way it does up here — snow, wind, fog, the temperature dropping like a stone, and no shelter anywhere on that bald summit. They had a jug of whiskey with them, and out in that cold, tired and turned around, they made the mistake so many have made: they sat down. And on a mountaintop in a snowstorm, sitting down is dying.
They weren't found until the following spring, months later, when a hunter came upon them up there on the knob. The jury that looked into it ruled the plain hard truth of it — that they'd frozen to death, lost and drinking, in the storm. They buried Andy Sherman right up near where he fell, and there's a simple cross and a marker up on that summit to this day.
So when you look up at that soft, pretty, blueberry knob, remember it wears two faces, same as all this high country. In summer it's a paradise. In a December whiteout it is as deadly as any peak in the Rockies. These are old, gentle-looking mountains — but 'gentle-looking' has killed more than one soul who forgot the second word. Respect the weather up here. Andy Sherman would tell you so himself, if the mountain had let him come down.
Photo: Brian Stansberry (photographer) · CC BY 3.0
