Officials review plans of hikers who got lost

PARIS – Officials are reviewing last weekend’s outing by a group of students and two teachers which resulted in a wilderness search after a storm dumped more than 3 feet of snow on the region.

School officials from Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School plan to examine the sequence of events on a three-day backpacking trip that culminated with the Maine Warden Service ferrying a group out of the woods on snowmobiles.

The warden service, meanwhile, is debating whether to send a bill to the high school class and other groups of people it assisted in the woods Monday after the storm.

The warden service by law can charge for the cost of wilderness searches in cases where people are negligent or reckless. Those standards may be hard to establish given weather forecasts that at first predicted small amounts of snow in the area. But the head of the warden service criticized the group for not taking snowshoes with them into the woods.