Snowbound Students Return to Hoopla : Homecoming: Youths who were caught in the blizzard are puzzled by all the fuss surrounding their mountain adventure.

When you’ve been going to the private Cranbrook Schools since kindergarten, the way York Ragsdale has, you just take the wilderness expedition for granted.

He can’t remember a time when he didn’t assume that he would one day face the annual spring-break rite of passage for sophomores at Cranbrook Kingswood, the high school: a trek through the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee that would test him physically and mentally in a way the classrooms, museums and playing fields of the exclusive campus never could.

When he came of age this year, his mother had just one concern: York’s retainer with two false teeth attached. “Don’t lose your teeth,” she warned him as he departed 13 days ago.

On Wednesday, 81 students returned, less than 19 hours late despite being caught in the Blizzard of ’93 while their parents, TV networks and newspapers across the nation wondered where they were in a collective spasm of waiting-up-for-the-teen-agers.

As their two charter buses pulled up to the building that houses English and art classes, excited relatives’ screams and the clicking of press cameras filled the air. Wearing back frames equipped with packs and bedrolls, the prodigal sophomores alighted in various stages of fatigue and dishabille--but all very visibly alive.

York and his mother embraced. Then she noticed the gaps in his grin. The teeth were somewhere back on the mountain. York was lucky his mother was so relieved to have him home.

He still wasn’t quite sure why she was so jubilant, why reporters had swarmed the hotel parking lot in Knoxville, Tenn., why some even followed the buses all the way back to school. It seemed a trifle overdone that their families were greeting them with homemade signs, that balloons in the school’s blue and green bobbed everywhere.

A nearby public high school, Bloomfield Hills Lahser, contributed cookies, sodas and sandwiches, all laid out in the dining hall where the families had gathered together all week to worry about the youths. The owner of a local sports shop brought over 90 T-shirts bearing the slogan: “I Survived Cranbrook Kingswood Wilderness Expedition 1993.”

Many of Ragsdale’s comrades were just as puzzled by the fuss, despite their having left behind in Knoxville hospitals an adult leader and a student with the first injuries in the 23-year history of the school’s program.

“What are you doing here?” Remy Lobo, 16, asked his 21-year-old sister, Ekta. She had flown in from Los Angeles, where she attends USC, to welcome him back from the woods.

All right, it snowed. It was sunny when they first entered the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest; then it snowed a lot. But “ we didn’t know it was the storm of the century ,” Lobo said.

Indeed, Lobo’s group initially waved off a U.S. Forest Service rescue helicopter that dropped a yellow streamer wrapped around a message offering help. It wasn’t until the copter returned that they accepted an airlift out. “Actually, they ordered us to come,” Lobo said.

The group, broken into small 8-person “crews” had expected challenges. After all, on the page headed “Philosophy” in the expedition handbook, one listed purpose of the program is to “provide vivid raw materials for building the collective memory of a class.”

That it did. They’ll be swapping tales at Cranbrook Kingswood for some time to come about the crew that huddled together for warmth in a concrete tunnel one night, passing the time by reading Ku Klux Klan slogans painted on the bottom. And the girl whose pack was stolen by some animal--the adult leader said it was a raccoon, but she’s convinced it was a bear.

They slept under tarps that were weighed down by a foot of snow by morning, making it tough to get out and impossible to get out dry. They sang old James Brown songs--and some others they are too embarrassed to divulge--to keep their spirits up.

“We bonded,” Lobo said. Wearing a blue bandanna over his head, stubble on his chin and shorts--”to make a statement,” he said--he credited his high spirits and health to the teacher who led the group. “Mr. Meehan is a God of the wilderness,” he proclaimed.

He said he never once doubted he’d make it back to the appointed meeting place. “Mostly,” he said, “we just thought: ‘Bummer. Look at all this snow. Let’s get through it.’ ”

Rosemary McCarthy, a student from Battle Creek, Mich., was in a crew that did get lost, but the group met up on Sunday with another Cranbrook Kingswood crew that knew the way out. “Mostly,” she said, “I was just wet.”

She would go again, sure. “Well . . . “ she paused. “Maybe not next year, but probably my senior year. I could go as a co-leader.”

The worst fright, most agreed, came after they emerged from the woods to find much of the nation’s attention focused on their fate. They had wondered about the helicopters overhead but had little idea that National Guard units of two states and the U.S. Army had been searching exhaustively for them.

At a Holiday Inn in Knoxville, they started worrying about the classmates who had still to appear--even though they weren’t due yet. The TVs in their rooms only worked sporadically, and if they went outside, they faced ambush by the national press.

Once the last 21 students and three adults were located, the campers relaxed enough to realize how weary they were. Most of them napped during the 18-hour bus ride back.

The families relaxed too. “On Monday, I was looking at York’s picture on the piano, and I was thinking maybe I’d been too confident, that this was it,” said Nancy Ragsdale of her son. “But as soon as I was losing it, they found him.”

The homecoming excitement past, the trekkers were already making plans Wednesday evening for the remainder of their vacation, which lasts the rest of the month.

“Hopefully,” McCarthy said, “I’ll get my driver’s license, finally.”

York Ragsdale hasn’t had enough of the outdoors. He wants to go cross-country skiing and camping.

His sister, Laura, is a freshman. Already, she is lobbying for a slot on the expedition of 1994. “We’ll see,” their mother said. “OK. She’ll find the teeth and bring them back next year.”