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.