The Skyview High School marching band and dance team got more than it bargained for during a northern Arizona sightseeing trip gone wrong.
Namely, a powerful winter blizzard — which trapped the Storm for an unplanned overnight stay Wednesday in tiny Williams, Ariz., after about 113 students and accompanying adults visited the Grand Canyon.
Once the wind and snow subsided Thursday and interstate highways 17 and 40 were reopened after about 24 hours’ closure, two charter buses hustled the group back to Glendale, Ariz., where the Storm were to compete at 9 p.m. in the Fiesta Bowl Band Championship finals. Results were unavailable at press time.
Organizers gave the band a late evening slot in the finals after it missed the preliminary round held Thursday afternoon, said Skyview Principal Kym Tyelyn-Carlson, who is traveling with the group.
The Storm were among nine bands scheduled for the contest, one of several events linked to the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl football game in Glendale, just outside Phoenix, on Saturday.
The band is due to join a dozen groups performing in Friday’s Fiesta Bowl Parade.
Before the Fiesta, though, came a frosty misadventure.
The Skyview group awoke in its Phoenix-area quarters well before sunrise Wednesday for what’s normally a three-hour freeway drive north to Williams, about 30 miles west of Flagstaff.
From Williams, the group took a tourist train ride to the Grand Canyon Village, perched inside the national park on the south rim of the famed gorge.
The students saw “a lot of history” and a somewhat limited view of the canyon between gathering storm clouds, Tyelyn-Carlson said.
By the time they returned to Williams, the storm had begun to pump as much as two feet of snow on the region surrounding Flagstaff, which rests at 7,000-feet elevation.
Several accidents, along with blinding wind gusts, forced authorities to shut down snow-packed and icy highways. That included I-40 that runs past Williams and I-17 between Flagstaff and Phoenix.
Finding itself stranded in Williams, population 5,000, the Skyview group found ample help.
The Arizona travel agency in charge of Skyview’s trip helped book nearly an entire Super 8 motel for the night.
Safeway donated toothbrushes and other items for the group, which had brought plenty of warm clothing but little else. On Thursday, city officials opened a youth recreation center to the group. A local food bank brought groceries for the hungry bunch.
“We have just been treated like gold,” Tyelyn-Carlson said. Williams’ mayor, city manager and police chief had gotten involved, she said. “Our students are getting a first-hand experience at what a generous community does.”
Band parents and students were able to keep Vancouver friends and family posted on the episode, by text messages, e-mail and telephone.
“The kids have been nothing but positive, good sports,” Tyelyn-Carlson said shortly before the group got cleared about 1:30 p.m. Thursday to resume travel back to Glendale. “We’re going hour by hour.”
It also helped that Skyview had purchased trip insurance to help cover unanticipated costs.
Plenty of warning
Left unclear was why the tour company, or bus company, would persist with the trip despite specific storm warnings.
A full day before Skyview headed north, the National Weather Service forecast a “100 percent chance of snow” with nine to 19 inches accumulating from Wednesday to Thursday, as reported early Tuesday by the Flagstaff Daily Sun newspaper. Strong winds, with blowing and drifting snow, were expected.
Actual weather service readings show that as Skyview’s buses passed Flagstaff on Wednesday, there were 30 mph wind gusts, barely a half-mile of visibility and snow spitting through mist and freezing fog.
It wasn’t much better at Grand Canyon Village, although wind did part the clouds at times.
“Sometimes life happens,” Tyelyn-Carlson said. Throughout the trip, Skyview leaders took “expert advice” of the travel agency, bus personnel and the city and highway officials, she said.
“Our No. 1 priority was student safety. The roads were open, with no visibility issue” en route to the canyon, she said.
A Fiesta Bowl volunteer spokesman said severity of the weather, which even dropped snow flurries into Phoenix on Thursday, caught longtime residents off-guard.
“It was wild. No one expected it to be what it was,” said Kevin Lewis.
Despite rare, below-freezing temperatures expected overnight, Friday’s Glendale parade should come off as planned, he said.
