PARIS – “Anyone would have done it,” Kyle Ingram said Wednesday of his effort to shovel fellow student hikers out of a heavy snowstorm in the White Mountain National Forest last weekend.

He had his head lamp on. He had a shovel. The seven students in Ann Speth’s Wilderness Leadership class at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School had planned this trip since the school year began. He, like the others, came prepared.

“I threw on my clothes and boots. None of us were sleeping much” anyway, Ingram said.

It was midnight Saturday night, day two of a three-day weekend winter hiking and camping trip in the White Mountain National Forest of western Maine. After a day of hiking, they had set up camp in the middle of a bushwhack, between the Red Rock and Haystack trails in Mason Township.

It had snowed hard all day, and the tents and tarps that sheltered his classmates and two teachers were nearly buried. They needed some breathing space.

They never expected this much snow. Three and a half feet of snow would fall by the time the storm broke on Monday and help from the Maine Warden Service arrived.

Ingram was the one who happened to get up to go outside. English teacher Jeff Norton, a former wilderness class instructor who was along on the trip, suggested he grab the group’s one shovel and get to work.

“Anyone would have done it,” he said. “That’s what the course is about, to prepare you to deal with a situation like that.”

He, Norton and Sean Bryant were underneath a tarp supported by poles on three sides. The fourth side, meant to be open to the air, had caved in, he said.

Nearby were two tents. In a two-man tent was Speth with the two female students, Leah Jutras and Jen Norton, Jeff Norton’s niece visiting from Massachusetts.

A three-man tent held students Mike Damon, Jeremy Garcia, Brandon Atkinson and Josh Eichel. Everyone had sleeping bags and a ground pad.

“It’s a class that’s run by the students and supervised by adults,” he said. That didn’t change, even when the weather turned out to be much worse than expected.

“We bounced ideas back and forth” as a group, he said. The only time the teachers intervened was Sunday morning, when they decided to head for Route 113 instead of making a 3 p.m. rendezvous as planned.

“We took the wrong compass bearing. Jeff stepped in and said we need to look at the bearing again,” the 17-year-old Norway resident said. They retook their bearings, then started on their way.

Fellow senior Jutras was the hero on Sunday, he said, when she led the group in breaking trail. They trudged for 12 hours along Route 113 through the deep, unbroken snow, traveling at a pace of around one mile for every three hours.

“She was remarkable that day. She was incredibly determined, and had boundless stamina,” he said.

For all but one of the students, it was their first year of taking the class. Most had prior experience camping, and all share a love of the outdoors. Ingram said none of the students panicked, or thought of the experience as an ordeal.

“I am choosing to talk because I want to see the correct information,” he said. “I want to put some fears to rest.”

Sunday night was a sleepless night as the group camped across from Hastings Campground on Route 113 om Batchelders Grant. They had risen early and hiked north for about an hour when the first warden reached them by snowmobile, just over a mile from Route 2. Only then did they realize that a major search and rescue operation had been mounted on their behalf.

“We didn’t think the response we got would be as large as it was,” Ingram said. The group was bused back to the high school to greet some very anxious parents and school administrators.

All of the campers were in school as usual the next day. They jointly drafted a letter thanking the wardens and all of the people who helped with the search, including Bethel Rescue, Mahoosuc Mountain Rescue Team, Bethel and Gilead Fire Departments, and school administrators.

“Lastly we need to thank all of our parents, seeing an army of help waiting for us at the end of the trip is a big reminder of how much you love us,” Ingram wrote on behalf of the class.

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