Ramsey Cascades manway - anybody done it?

[EAnderson]

Years ago (like 35), a kid got lost in winter in deep snow and tried to take the Ramsey Cascades manway down. They found his body about half-way between the AT and the Cascades...

I think that may be Boy Scout Geoff Hague who you are refering to (1970?). He was actually found off of the Boulevard Trail on Walker Camp drainage after becoming lost. He and his troop were at Icewater the previous night, and somehow he turned onto the Boulevard Trail while his troop went back to Newfound Gap. The search and rescue thought he was trying to take the creek down to hit 441 below.

[TIDE-HSV]

I don't think that's the same incident. The case I'm thinking about is not as early as '70, and there were two adult hikers. I really don't remember why there was one survivor, but the guy who died actually made it almost all the way down to the Cascades. How he even found the opening in all that snow is a mystery. There was a ranger named Arthur Whitehead, out of Cades Cove and a native of Maryville, who was in charge of searches for quite a long period of time. We became friends and discussed a number of fatalities, including this one...

Edit - I think the incident was detailed in the book titled ''Lost,'' which I can´t seem to lay my hands on at the moment...

[TIDE-HSV]

Talking about ''lost,'' and Boy Scouts, I remembered a backpack my wife and I were on around 15 years or so ago. We were hiking with a friend, who went on to thru hike later, and we decided to drop down to a back country campsite just above Smokemont for lunch. She left before us and we tried to follow the trail out, but it petered out at the creek. We had a topo and it was clear. I ended up wading down the creek, trying to find the trail. Finally, we backtracked to the trail we had left and followed it to to the beautiful new bridge which I was only one bend in the creek from discovering. A few years after that, a Boy Scout troop got trapped by snow in that same campsite, occasioning a lengthy search for them. I´m sure they were relying on old topos also...