`We Knew We Had To Get Help' -- Students Fight Through Snow To Bring Rescuers To Their Friends

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. - Shivering and frostbitten, Marcy Paisley and Mark Penske pressed on.

Their pants were frozen from fording icy Citico Creek.

They'd left behind the others in their group hours earlier because some members were bootless and unable to struggle through waist-deep snow and bitter winds in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains along the the Tennessee-North Carolina border.

But they knew better than to give up.

Sunday evening, the two students from Detroit's private Cranbrook Kingswood Upper Middle School found a road, and it led them to some fishermen who almost certainly saved their lives.

"They dried us," Paisley, 18, said gratefully just hours after the students and the fishermen were rescued by National Guardsmen. "They fed us and gave us warm clothes."

Today, military helicopters and park rangers were still searching for 21 students and three adult teachers, the last of 117 students and teachers caught in the Great Smoky Mountains by the biggest storm of the century.

Yesterday it took sixteen trips by four military helicopters - and the willpower of students - to get 56 hikers out of the park, including Paisley's party.

The Cranbrook campers were hiking in parties of eight in three different parks in the 800-square-mile region of the Smokies.

Paisley was student leader for her team. She and Penske, 16, knew they were taking a risk when they broke away from their group Sunday in hopes of finding a path out of the forest.

"We knew we had to get help," Paisley said yesterday afternoon by phone from Tellico Plains, Tenn., a town of about 1,000.

Charles Hall, rescue coordinator in Tellico Plains, said the two accomplished their goal.

"These two probably saved the others," he said, adding that rescue teams might not have known until too late that the Cranbrook party was in the mountains otherwise.

Paisley, of Milford, Mich., is a senior. She and math teacher James Woodruff were leading a group of eight Cranbrook Kingswood sophomores, including Penske, through the Unaka Range when the storm hit Friday.

Paisley had gone on the annual camping trip when she was a sophomore. Now, trained in CPR and first aid, she was ready.

But no one expected such a vicious, pounding blizzard - although a National Park Service official said yesterday that the students and counselors had been warned of the approaching storm and urged to cancel their hike.

"It was snowing but we had no idea it would snow so much," Penske said. "We just stayed on the trail, and thought it would stop. . . . It probably snowed three feet."

The snow continued Saturday as the group tried to get back down the mountain, back to safety. The going was nearly impossible.

"You couldn't see five feet in front of your face," Penske said.

Just finding the trail, Paisley said, was a challenge. Marks blazed on trees disappeared under the snow.

Then student Danielle Swank, who was having more trouble than the other students, fell behind. Woodruff also fell away from the group, apparently staying with Swank.

"We lost them somehow," Paisley said. "We waited an hour or two and then went ahead."

Paisley led her group, now eight students including herself, for several hours, struggling to get off a relatively unprotected ridge. As darkness approached on Saturday, they unfolded the tarps they were carrying and built a shelter, and huddled together for warmth. Fear deepened the cold.

Some of the students were "freaking out," Paisley said. "But I realized I couldn't. I had to tell them they'd live."

Sunday dawned. Paisley's training said: Keep going. But there were new problems. Several of the students had removed their boots before crawling into their sleeping bags.

Snow and cold air, penetrating into the shelter, had frozen the boots solid, and there was no way to get them back on. They wrapped their feet with what materials they had and forged on.

But at about 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon, it became clear that at least several of the students, suffering hypothermia and frostbite, could go no farther.

They built another shelter. Paisley and Penske, in the best condition, decided to try to walk the rest of the way out. They left behind their backpacks full of food, clothing and their sleeping bags. It was a big risk.

"We made sure they were OK," said Paisley. "I told them all they had to do is keep warm, and they could do that by body heat."

Several hours later - wet from their river crossings and, they knew, in serious trouble - Paisley and Penske came across the fishermen whose four-wheel drive trucks were stuck in the drifting snow on a back road.

Early yesterday morning, the National Guard came across the fishermen and their student guests. They rode into a Tellico Plains rescue station in a tank, Penske said.

After harrowing days and nights in the mountains, all in their group were rescued by yesterday, but several were suffering from severe frostbite and other exposure-related ailments.

Woodruff, separated from his students, was found by the helicopter that picked up his students. He was lying in the snow, said student Rob Molloy, 15.

"We spotted him from the helicopter," Molloy said. "He was unconscious. The doctors worried about his feet. . . . They had to cut his boots off."

Woodruff, 39, was in serious condition at the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville.

Kathryn Penske, Mark's mother, said the teenagers had no idea of the storm's historic magnitude or the massive efforts rescuers went through to find them.

When Mark called home yesterday, she said, "I'm crying and he says, `What's the matter?' "

Paisley and Penske have mild frostbite on their feet and are expected to be fine. Even after their ordeal, they were calm beyond their years.

"We're supposed to be prepared for just about everything," said Paisley. "We did a lot of praying."

-- Information from the Detroit News is included in this report.