A night of high winds and heavy rains led to roads closed due to downed trees, downed trees leading to power outages, outages that nearly caused at least one school to be closed.  Rain totals of 4 inches and more were recorded across the High Country as Avery, Mitchell, and Yancey schools closed early due to predictions of more.  More roads were closed, more trees fell during the course of the storm, but fire departments across the area and the NC DOT took care of most of the issues in short order.

(photos:  Annie Rutenberg, Phillip Greene)