Students Rescued After Night on N.H. Mountain

Three Harvard graduate students were rescued Monday morning after being stranded in neck deep snow and spending the night in a makeshift shelter on Mt. Lafayette in New Hampshire.

A New Hampshire conservation officer descended from a helicopter, loaner snowshoes in hand, to rescue the wayward hikers.

Five hikers were stranded, three from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The trio, plus one Cambridge resident, split off from the rest of the Dudley House outings group while descending from the top of Mt. Lafayette at about 2 p.m. on Sunday.

"That's when we lost the trail almost immediately," said Richard Whalley, a 26-year-old student in the music department.

Though the snow was only ankle deep on the trail, it reached depths of four to six feet off the trail, up to the hikers' necks.

"It was so cold I didn't take my gloves off to eat my cheese sandwich," Whalley said.

The four then stumbled across another lost hiker, Alan Carpentier, a 28-year-old mechanical engineer from Londonberry, N.H.

The hikers made their way through the snow with an ice ax, taking turns clearing the path for four hours.

Once darkness began descending, they decided to use Carpentier's cell phone to call the police. Authorities put them in touch with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, but no help came by nightfall.

With the coming of night, the group decided to erect a makeshift shelter and hunker down on their backpacks to sleep.

The group huddled together for warmth, and called the authorities again at 8 a.m. the next morning.

By 11, authorites sent a helicopter to search the mountain, guided by Carpentier on his cell phone.

The hikers shook trees and waved their jackets to attract the searchers' attention.

Eric Aldrich, a spokesperson for the Fish and Game Department, said the department conducts about 150 to 200 rescue missions over the course of a year.

Since last year, a New Hampshire law has allowed the department to bill those who are rescued if they are deemed to be "very reckless" in their actions.

Aldrich said the five hikers may be at fault for failing to bring snowshoes into the deep snow, although the case will be "judged on its own merit," he said.

Last year, the department billed about five lost hikers, one as much as $2,000, he said.

Not having snow shoes was a mistake, but "not too unreasonable", said Philip L.F. Johnson '01, a member of the Harvard Outing Club, a undergraduate student group not affiliated with the Dudley House group.

"There are risks in winter hiking," he said.

The rest of the Dudley House outings group had gotten back to Cambridge without incident.