Four college students on spring break spent two nights holed up in a three-sided trail shelter on the Appalachian Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park last week when a snow and ice storm at high elevations caught them off guard.

The students planned to hike the 70-mile stretch of Appalachian Trail through the park in just five days, an ambitious proposition even in perfect weather. They set out from Fontana Dam early Monday morning. By mid-afternoon, they reached the Spence Field trail shelter 15 miles into the park. The next trail shelter at Derrick Knob was another 6.5 miles. They decided to push on, a decision that ultimately cost them their trip.

“We had beautiful weather the first part of the day and were feeling pretty good about it. Along the way we hit some pretty treacherous terrain and it started coming down with really icy rain,” said Ryne McCall, a 19-year-old freshman at N.C. State University.

By the time the hikers reached the next trail shelter Monday night 22 miles into the park, their clothes and packs were soaked. They stripped down and draped their wet clothes on the wooded rafters of the trail shelter and a clothesline strung inside the room. They hung a tarp over the open side of the three-sided shelter. But as they slept, snow and ice blew past the tarp into the shelter. The wet clothes froze.

The next morning, the students assessed their situation and decided to stay put for the day.

“If there was anything we did right, it was staying put. Mostly what kept us alive was realizing we shouldn’t brave the weather,” said Ivan Saldarriaga, also a NCSU freshman who had planned to spend his 19th birthday on the trail.

The students had gotten a fire going with fire paste and a stack of dry wood that was left inside the shelter. The youths took turns tending the fire to keep it going. But mid-day Tuesday, the teens realized their situation was not merely miserable but potentially life-threatening. One of the hikers, Matt Schultz, a 19-year-old freshman at NCSU, was beginning to suffer from the onset of hypothermia.

“Matt was helping me tend the fire when all of a sudden he stood up and said ‘I’m feeling a little dizzy, I’m going to go lie down on my pack.’ I went over to him and he was shivering and started to zone out,” said Saldarriaga.

Early Tuesday afternoon, the teen-agers were discovered by a group of six backpackers from Pennsylvania who were also hiking the AT during spring break. That group was planning on staying at the next trail shelter another four miles down the trail, but due to the bad weather decided to knock off early and discovered the cold, soaking group from Raleigh.

“They saved our lives,” hiker Brian Hendricks said of the group from Messiah College in Pennsylvania.

The hikers with the Pennsylvania group had wilderness medical training. They wrapped Schultz in plastic and fleece and gave him hot liquids.

“He stabilized at least but he was still feeling weak,” Saldarriaga said of Schultz.

Two of the Pennsylvania group decided to hike out for help. The others stayed behind.

Six hours later at 7:30 p.m., the two Pennsylvania hikers reached the closest trailhead at Elkmont and found a trail volunteer known as a “ridge runner” who happened to be in the parking lot. The trail volunteer called a park emergency line on a telephone that had just been installed earlier that day. There is no cell phone reception in that area of the park.

“They reported that all four of the stranded backpackers were cold and wet and ill-equipped for the weather conditions and that one of the hikers was showing signs of hypothermia,” according to Nancy Gray, park spokesperson.

Since the situation did not seem immediately life-threatening, park rangers postponed a search party until first thing in the morning to avoid traversing the icy trails at night. Park rangers reached the students around 1:30 p.m. the following day and escorted them out. Schultz was airlifted to the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville on a National Guard Blackhawk helicopter with the 146th Medical Support Unit from Georgia.

“Rangers felt that Shultz was in good condition, but had enough concern about his ability to hike out and determined that he should be flown out as a precautionary measure,” Gray said.

The rescued students said they were not prepared for the change in weather and had not researched the type of equipment they needed on the trail.

“We didn’t do our homework,” said McCall. “It was a combination of mistakes.”

“We had a lot of cotton gear and apparently the thing on the trail is cotton kills,” McCall said. “Really, we did get lucky.”