Stand Up That Mountain

Jay Leutze’s Stand Up That Mountain (2012) is a nonfiction book about a rural mountain community that bands together to save a mountain from an unscrupulous mining company. Leutze, who earned a law degree but never became a practicing attorney, becomes involved with the case and delivers intimate knowledge of the story. He worked closely with the lawyers involved in the case and the townspeople fighting against the mining company to produce the narrative.

The book takes place around the turn of the millennium. After graduating from law school, Leutze chose not to become an attorney but, instead, retired to a remote family cabin in the North Carolina mountains. There, he lived the simple life of an outdoorsman: he fished, hiked, and occasionally wrote. But one day, he received a call from a fourteen-year-old neighbor, Ashley Cook. She told him that the Mining Act of 1971 was being violated right outside her house. She knew he had a law degree, and she hoped he could help her family. The story unfolds from there.

The crux of the issue was that Paul Brown, the owner of a gravel mining company, had set his sights on pulverizing nearby Belview Mountain. Gravel, as Leutze admits, is surprisingly important to modern society: it’s used to make asphalt for roads and parking lots, to stop erosion and fix potholes. But it’s made from the dust of mountains. And Belview, to Leutze and to the Cook-Cox family who reached out to him, was part of their land and their home.



To the mining company, the mountain was a resource to be used, a source of financial profit. In its pursuit of this new opportunity, it neglected its legal duties. None of the owners of land adjacent to the mine were given the necessary notification about the opening of the mine. That lack of notification meant that none of them had had the chance to protest the opening of a mine almost in their own backyards. Every one of them had been in the dark until the mine began its earth-shattering operations. Ashley Cook called after an explosion at the mine cracked the foundation of her Aunt Ollie Cox’s house. Ashley, whom Leutze describes as a whip-smart girl, looked up mining laws on the Internet before seeking his aid.

Leutze quickly becomes an advocate for the people of the small mountain community known as Dog Town. He has to borrow a cell phone, and in the era before unlimited minutes, begins to rack up enormous phone bills reaching out to connections that might be able to help. Soon, he is also putting thousands of miles on the odometer of his truck driving to journalists, politicians, and lawyers to spread the word.

He discovers the underhanded tactics Brown used to avoid giving nearby residents notice about the mine. When applying for the mining permit, he drew the 151-acre permit area fifty feet inside his own property lines so that there were technically no adjoining landowners to those boundaries—only himself. Officials within the North Carolina government failed to notice what Brown had done and granted the permit.



The state government had failed to notice something else: the proposed site of the mine was only two miles from the Appalachian Trail. The AT is a protected wilderness area, a national park intended to offer hikers an unbroken stretch of wilderness spanning more than 2,000 miles, from Georgia to Maine. If the mining is allowed to continue and Belview reduced to rubble, hikers would be greeted with a scarred landscape and the constant noise of machinery—for the more than one hundred years of the mine’s projected operations.

The explosions and noise from the mine would not only mean the disturbance of the nation’s single most famous trail but also the destruction of a way of life for the people of Dog Town, affectionately referred to as the Dog Town Bunch. These people work hard to document what they can: Ashley researches law, Ollie takes photographs of mining operations, and Ollie’s son, Freddy, spies on the mine from his dirt bike.

Leutze learns, to his surprise, that these mountain people have little knowledge of the AT. Because the trail is intended to run through remote areas, offering hikers little contact with other people, the Dog Town Bunch are totally unaware that the trail is so close to them. Ollie refers to the trail as “that little dirt path,” unaware that she is talking about a national park. This lack of awareness means that she and others are at first distrustful of the AT community, the hikers and conservationists who care about the trail’s preservation. As someone who loves the trail and knows the small mountain town, Leutze works to build trust between the two groups.



The legal battle isn’t easily won. Leutze chronicles successes and failures along the way. In the end, the case takes four years. The AT Conservancy and the National Parks Conservation Association become involved. The stakes are high: if Dog Town loses and Brown’s mining company wins, there is a precedent to continue the destruction of protected National Parks land.

Finally, the decision comes: the mine is suspended for obtaining its permit illegally. Belview Mountain stands, albeit with noticeable scars from the mine’s brief operation, and the solitude of the area is maintained for both AT hikers and the residents of Dog Town.

The case was a notable one for conservation, and Stand Up That Mountain drew praise for its compelling David-and-Goliath narrative. Leutze continues to work for conservation and advocacy efforts. Since the book’s publication, he has given lectures at universities nationwide and in 2012 was awarded the highest civilian honor North Carolina has to offer, the Order of the Longleaf Pine, for his efforts to conserve his state’s land and water resources.