I left Amicalola on Wednesday, March 10, 1993 and by the night of the 12th, my journey was going well. In fact, my journal entry that day stated:
March 12 Friday-Fantastic day! Took 1 and a half hours to get going - made whole wheat pancakes for breakfast. Hit the tail at 8:30 and cruised for a while. Got hailed on, but it wasn't very noticeable. Took a long time to hit Woody Gap but got a second wind when we stopped for dinner 2.2 miles from Jarrard Gap. Cruised uphill and it started to snow! Its accumulating too! We went about a mile past Jarrard and would have kept going except that darkness was due to fall soon. Took pictures of snow on the tent and wrote. Too cool! We definitely got our second wind today! I love it!

Perhaps our campsite was at Bird Gap or Turkey Stamp Mountain. I's hard to tell since there was no shelter there back then but there was a small clearing where we pitched the tent. We had come about 13 miles from Justus Creek, and had met a second set of would-be thru hikers the day before (and one set on the 10th). It was a different time back then; fewer hikers on the trail (at least on Wednesdays) and no cell phones for common folk. We had driven through the night Tuesday and set off from the park before it opened as the third driver left with the car, so we hadn't signed a register there, just the one at Springer. My partner had never been backpacking before, but she had tons of experience with similar things, like hiking, camping, camping trips on horses, etc. We hadn't packed a weather radio- why bother? We were prepared for some snow and we were enjoying it.

We had a North Face Tadpole for a tent, expedition weight polypro tops, bottoms and balaclavas (the real stuff that clings, not the fleece you commonly see today), gore-tex jackets and glove liners. I had gore-tex side zip pants and knee-high gaiters, and my partner had cheap rain pants. We had a map and compass, as well as guidebook pages for the area. I wore glasses, and my partner had contacts. We both had room for sunglasses and sunscreen in our packs, and we'd left carrying food for five days (just in case- our next resupply was Neels Gap), a white gas whisperlite stove, katadyn pocket water filter and nalgene water bottles. My luxury item was the bakepacker that I had used that morning for pancakes. All told, we left the park with packs weighing about 35 pounds each and no idea of what we getting into. Of course, at that point, no one had any idea. I'm very glad the light-weight craze wasn't around then. As it was, the weather was never bad enough to force us to take a day off, but the next day was the most physically brutal day I've ever experienced.
But that night, we had no idea what was coming...