From Staff Reports

Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the Eastern United States, amassed the highest snowfall total in the massive storm that swept through Asheville — and up the East Coast — on the weekend of Jan. 22-24.

With 5 more inches added by early Jan. 24, Mount Mitchell State Park tallied a record 66 inches of snowfall. That depth topped the previous record of 50 inches that fell in the Blizzard of 1993, according to the State Climate Office of North Carolina.

Meteorologist Jeffrey Taylor of the National Weather Service told local news media that they had not heard of anywhere else in the nation getting anything close to that total.

Snow began to fall in advance of the massive storme, with 0.6 inches recorded on Jan. 20.

Mount Mitchell saw 8.5 inches on Jan. 21 and 11 inches on Jan. 22. On Jan. 23, the park was hit with 41 inches of snowfall.

Rangers dealt with white-out conditions, trying to plow the road up to the station beneaht the 6,684-foot peak.

“Friday, we got hammered,” Bryan Wilder, park superintendent, told the Asheville Citizen-Times. “It was brutal. We had 4 or 5 inches an hour, and you really couldn’t tell if you were on the road or not.”

Crews were using heaving equipment to push the snow from the road and down the slopes, where they could.

With the wind blowing snowbanks, we have about six feet of snowpack, give or take,” Wilder said on Jan. 24.