On the westerly part of the route the explorers had neglected to blaze the way, and now, day after day, the sun was hidden by thick clouds.  Robertson had no difficulty so long as he could take his bearings by the course of the Watauga, but when he had passed the sources of that stream he was all at sea, with neither sun nor star nor compass to guide him.  He scanned the heavens with anxious eye, but they disclosed no glimpse of the blessed sun:  all was mist and rain by day, and by night the blackest of darkness.  Tired, drenched, bewildered, he wandered aimlessly on, lost, completely lost, in an almost interminable forest.  His food, too, was fast running low, and the scant herbage still left among the trees would no longer sustain his jaded animal.  Then he turned the trusty beast adrift, to find its own way out of starvation.

He had eked out his scanty provisions with the nuts of the beech and chestnut, but now this resource was exhausted; the last handful of corn was consumed, and he was in a region of rocks and precipices (probably near the western base of the mountain), where nothing grew that would sustain life.  Exhausted nature could hold out no longer.  His strength was gone, he could not articulate above a whisper, and, sinking down at the foot of a cliff, he resigned himself to the inevitable.

How long he lay there he never told, and perhaps never knew; but at last, when his senses were nearly gone, he heard voices, and then approaching footsteps.  They were two hunters, probably the only two human beings within a radius of a hundred miles.  They came directly to the spot where he was lying, but did not see him till actually upon him.  Dismounting from their horses, they lifted him in their arms, revived him with some spirits, and then, sparingly at first, ministered to him of the food in their knapsacks.  Slowly his strength returned, but they stayed by him, and, when he was able to mount, seated him on one of their horses, and then guided him out of the mountain and for more than fifty miles on his way to the settlements.  Then the good Samaritans went as they came, into the wide forest, leaving not even their names to a wondering tradition.

His friends and neighbors were enraptured with the description Robertson gave of the country he had discovered.  To them the sterile plains and rocky uplands of Wake County lost their attractions when compared with the fertile valley which he pictured, and sixteen families prepared to go with him in the following spring to a new home west of the mountains.

When the April rains were over, they set out, about eighty souls, men, women, and children.  They journeyed slowly, the men mostly on foot, the women on pack-horses, with the younger children in their arms or strapped upon the horses behind them, and the older ones trudging along by the side of their fathers, or aiding to drive the neat cattle, a score or more of which were the advance-guard of the cavalcade.