A multifaceted rescue effort extricated a stranded hiker from the backcountry of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on Tuesday, Jan. 18.

I don’t know if our recent ancestors were better weather readers than we, or if they simply knew, by late November, they should be prepared for winter. Nowadays we wait for forecasts from meteorologists, and likely rely on a little intuition as well. But by Thursday (Dec. 6) last week almost everyone was onboard with the idea North Carolina was dead in the sights of a major winter storm.

Around a foot of heavy, wet snow that started yesterday afternoon and continued through the night brought down trees, snapped power lines and made travel impossible for some, prompting Haywood County Board of Commissioners Chairman Kevin Ensley to declare a state of emergency as of 8:15 this morning.

Maps from Duke Energy show more than a hundred separate outages affecting at least 4,000 Haywood County customers, who remain without power as of about 11 a.m.