FARGO (AP) - Jack Landers says he and a friend could hear a rescue helicopter flying over them as they hiked but searchers couldn't see them because of trees.

"It was actually right above us," he said.

Landers, 19, arrived in his hometown of Fargo on Friday, just 26 hours after a plane spotted him and his college friend, Charlie Gruys, of Maple Lake, Minn., in the mountains near Kalispell, Mont., where they'd been lost since Wednesday evening.

Landers, a 2004 graduate of Fargo South and freshman at Montana State University in Bozeman, shared the story of how he and Gruys got separated from their spring break skiing crew and survived two days in heavy snowfall in the Jewel Basin area.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Landers said he and Gruys decided to break off from the six-man group because they were the only skiers with avalanche beacons.

When they first felt they might be lost, they followed ski tracks down to a lake, then hiked for about hour trying to find a parking lot before calling their friends on a cell phone to tell them they were lost.

As night fell, they used their avalanche shovels to dig out a snow shelter under a tree.

With the temperature hovering around 20, they slept for only a couple of hours before hiking again to stay warm.

They reached the top of a ridge Thursday and were able to contact rescuers by cell phone. By then, a major blizzard had hit the area, dumping 25 inches of snow over two days.

Rescuers told them to stay put. But after two hours atop the ridge in the driving snow and wind, they skied back down the mountain into a valley.

That's when they heard the National Guard helicopter, saw its navigation lights andknew searchers were looking in the right place, he said. They slept the night under a snow-covered bush.

Friday morning, they hiked farther down the ridge and found an old logging road.

They walked down the road and past a house where no one was home before a plane flew overhead and spotted them. Soon after, a truck picked them up.