Instead of souvenirs, a group of Edmonton students is bringing home a story of adventure after their bus became stranded on a remote Vancouver Island logging road this week.

The group of 10 grade-12 students and two teachers from the private Tempo School arrived in Victoria on Sunday. They were scheduled to fly by float plane to visit the Bamfield Marine Science Centre on the west coast of the island, but fog put a damper on their plans.

That's when they chartered a bus, and seemed to drop of the face of the Earth.

For almost a full day, no one heard from the students, and the RCMP launched an intensive search-and-rescue mission.

As it turns out, the regular route between Lake Cowichan and Bamfield was washed out, and the bus driver was forced to take a detour along a narrow logging road with no cell-phone service.

The conditions brought the bus to a halt several times.

"Everyone pitched in. We had a massive project filling in the first culvert. We could see it was washed out so we stopped before it and we moved many tonnes of rock to fill it in -- it was about six feet deep," driver Brendan McCullough said.

Despite the team effort to keep the bus moving, at about 2:20 a.m. on Monday, the group decided to spend the night at the side of the road and wait for first light.

"Little did we know what was going on in the rest of the world about us," teacher Tim Gannon said.

In Edmonton, the student's parents gathered at the school, fearing the worst, while media reports began trickling in about the bus lost in the wilderness.

"(We were) scared, hoping we find them just like any other parents," father Mamjit Nerval recalled.

"You just want to get there. You want to get on a plane, get there and go look for them yourself," mother Deloris Rath said.

Monday morning, McCullough rode his bike 40 kilometres until he found a logging truck operator, who eventually helped the group back into cell-phone range. They were finally able to call their frantic parents and tell them about their adventure.

"Everyone's okay and maybe learned a few survival techniques," teacher Cathryn van Kessel said.

As for the students, they say they enjoyed the excitement and camaraderie that came with spending a night in the woods.

With a report from CTV British Columbia's Brent Shearer