BLAIRSVILLE, Ga. -- Even before the snow started falling WSB-TV Channel 2 reporter Jeff Dore headed for the hills. He finally found flakes in Blairsville. Here's his latest dispatch and some pictures he e-mailed us.

Driving back on hwy 129 over the mountains.

A lot of wet, heavy snow on top at Walasi-Yi, and pretty good accumulations down the other side in Lumpkin and White Counties, too. Up at the top of the mountain, someone built a tiny snowman on the hood of a car.

Some hikers had spent the night at the hostel up there and hiked out in the morning, intending to go 15 miles through the snow today. Dennis told us that’s pretty common up there. Some people, like the Siberian Husky we met up there, just love being out in the snow!

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As the rain beat down the snow, we drove home by way of highway 129 over Blood Mountain at Neel Creek.

That’s Chuck the photo-journalist putting up with my amateur photography at the peak, where the Appalachian Trail crosses the highway.

That’s where we met Dennis Selburg shoveling snow in front of the Mountain Crossing at Walasi-Yi, the first backpacking outfitter northbound Trail hikers come to after about three days of mountain hiking, and where they often stagger in with big backpacks and say, “I need lighter stuff!”

The snow was wet and heavy, but Dennis enjoyed the work and the weather. It was warmer…at 32 degrees…than last week when it was 20, he told us.

********************************************************************************************************* That’s channel 2 Action News photographer Chuck Rakestraw Wednesday night as the snow was falling in Blairsville.

They got up to five inches in town by midnight when it turned to rain, and the snow on the ground started getting pounded and washed away.

It looked pretty while it lasted, and the school kids were excited to miss another day of school. They closed Union County schools the first three days of 2008, too, because of snow on the roads.

Here in Union County and over in Fanin County, emergency dispatchers tell me they had a rash of fender-bender wrecks before midnight, most of them people sliding off the roads, and none serious enough to hurt anyone. It’s 4:30 and we’ve already done one live shot for the early newscasts. We’ll be back for updates every half hour.

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The snow started falling in Blairsville at 5:52 pm…long after we heard there was more than an inch on the ground over in Blue Ridge.

All we were getting was a bunch of tiny, floating flakes.

By the time we went live at 6:30, though, snow was thick in the air. I realized it’s been years since I’ve done any reporting in the snow…and we used to do this all the time!

So it’s coming back to me how wet it is and that it gets in everything.

The Union County road crews are already out salting roads…they report some slick spots in the western part of the county, and the state crews are hitting the highways.

Photographer Chuck Rakestraw and I hope to get a few hours sleep tonight and wake up to a beautiful snowfall at about two in the morning so we can have fresh pictures and news on the early morning news starting at 4:30. The challenge will be to find people to talk to and do stories about at that time of the morning.