Cranbrook Students' Blizzard Survival Trek
In March 1993, 117 students and faculty from Cranbrook Kingswood Upper School in Michigan were on their annual survival trek in the Appalachians near the North Carolina-Tennessee border when the Blizzard of 1993 buried their camps in waist-deep snow. The groups had 10-day food supplies and prior hypothermia training, but they still battled frozen boots, wet stream crossings, and campers on the verge of hypothermia, as some could no longer move.
Late Sunday night, seniors Marcy Paisley and Mark Penske hiked three miles through the dark, crossed a waist-deep stream while soaking and freezing, and followed the smell of fire to a fishing camp where fishermen warmed them, fed them, and gave them dry clothes before National Guardsmen arrived around 1 a.m. More than a dozen helicopters from the Tennessee and North Carolina National Guard then joined ground teams to locate scattered parties, airlift stranded students, evacuate guide James Woodruff to a Knoxville hospital with frostbite, and ultimately bring every camper out alive.