MAZAMA, Wash., July 14 (UPI) -- A 16-year-old girl walked out of Washington's Cascade Mountains two days after surviving a plane crash that may have killed her step-grandparents, according to reports.
Autumn Veach was picked up by a passing motorist Tuesday near a hiking trail in Mazama, Wash., covered in cuts and bruises but without life-threatening injuries.
Veach had set out with her step-grandparents, Leland and Sharon Bowman, on a small private plane Saturday afternoon on a course from Kalispell, Mont., to Lynden, Wash. The Beech 35 Bonanza disappeared from radar somewhere over Omak, Wash.
Veach says the plane struck the side of a mountain and caught fire after exiting clouds. Following the crash, she was able to escape the wreckage but said she could not remove her grandparents.
After a day of waiting by the crash site for rescue she is reported to have followed a stream and walked out of the wilderness of the Cascade Mountains over the next day.
"She watches a lot of survival shows with me, so I can't get out and do a lot of the stuff anymore, so I watch it on TV. So 'Survivorman' should be very proud of her," Veach's father, David Veach, told CBS News.
After being picked up, Veach was driven to a general store before calling police and receiving medical attention at Three Rivers Hospital in Brewster, Wash. She suffered from dehydration and rhabdomyolysis, which, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, is a kidney-damaging release of muscle fiber contents into the blood following an injury to skeletal muscle.
"Autumn did not tell us the condition of her grandparents, but it doesn't sound good. It doesn't sound like they made it," Okanogan County Sheriff Frank Rogers told CNN. "It gets cold up there at night, pretty high elevations, so she survived not only the crash, then going through that. I will just tell you this from all of us here -- we are just impressed with her; she's like a kind of superhero."
