To Be King Of The Mountain

He looks at a bag of ice we had just picked up. "Watcha buy that sorry stuff for? Should've let me cut you up some real ice, twice as much for half the price." He points to a rusty hand-crank ice chopper. A cool breeze comes over his icehouse. And he's right; we should have.

Back in the car and starting our descent, we spot the first finger of Lake Lure reaching through the tree trunks, orange from the setting sun. At the turn of the century, they say, Lake Lure dreamed of being the resort of the South but the floods of '16 took down every bridge from the Smokies to the ocean. "Brought a live cow clean down here from Bat Cave. She spit up water for a while but didn't give no more milk."

Across from the lake Chimney Rock Mountain appears, a dark mountain with a chimney of rock against it, the American flag flapping. At the foot of the mountain are the motels, a miniature carnival and the shops, the fronts covered with towels painted with Indians, stuffed black bears and Confederate flags, bedspreads woven with peacocks.

"What do folks around here do for a living?"

"Oh, come winter we trap and skin coons and possums." The eyes crinkle. "In the summer we skin tourists."

In town now is a special crop of tourists, some from Massachusetts, Florida and Oklahoma, some from just around the bend, many come thousands of miles towing race-car rigs for about 15 minutes of wheel spinning up that old mountain. We drag the main and only street, checking out the machinery: the Baumgardner clan came 500 miles again in their Dodge motor home with Snoopy hooked on behind—a red checkerboard Mini Cooper; Pete Feistmann has a new Formula Ford, tree-frog green, first one ever run here; Ted Tidwell is back with the Formula B, 1,600 VW-powered—takes the engine out of his Dune Buggy and rebuilds it once a year for this run; and there's the record holder, John Scott's Cobra, a fat, bulging machine with a roll cage strong enough to hold up five upside-down cars. They're all here, all the oldtimers we expected and a whole batch of newcomers. We stop in at registration and find there is a record entry, 53 racers. At the end of the street we see the gate to the mountain, locked up for the day to remove the temptation of slipping in a little practice.

In the morning a crowd catcher, Formula Ford national champion Skip Barber, is due to arrive with a TECNO just out of the crate from Italy. "That ought to be the car to get up the mountain," everyone agrees; light, rear-engined, plenty of horsepower. "Yeah, but he's never seen the mountain."

"I don't reckon Stirling Moss would make you guys pack up and go home."

"Not if he hadn't seen the mountain."

Then Barber saw the mountain. His first comment, a quiet, awestruck "Wow...." His second, "Like nine racecourses strung together." They call the road a roller coaster without rails; driving it is like holding onto a greased blacksnake.