‘Surge of willpower’ saved teen after crash
High school student unable to pull grandparents from wreckage of plane in Washington state
When the small plane 16-year-old Autumn Veatch was on crashed last weekend in the Cascade Mountains, she said she thought she had fallen asleep and slipped into a nightmare.
“Everything was white, like everything — all the windows — everything was white,” she told NBC News. “Then suddenly it was just all trees. And then it was fire.”
Her first instinct was to pull her stepgrandparents from the wreckage.
“They were alive,” she told CNN, “and they were both screaming.
“There was no way I could get to Grandma because she was on the far side. But I assumed if I got Grandpa out first then maybe she would come out. But I was trying to pull him out and I just couldn’t do it.” So, she said, she was forced to watch them die.
“That’s something that’s going to haunt me forever,” she told ABC News.
Veatch, a high school student from Bellingham, Wash., was travelling Saturday with her stepgrandparents, Leland and Sharon Bowman, on a Beech A-35 from Kalispell, Mont., to Lynden, Wash. About 30 minutes before their scheduled arrival, they hit bad weather and fell from radar.
“We lost complete visibility. We couldn’t see out of the front at all,” Veatch later told NBC News. “Grandpa was just kind of like, ‘Wow, this isn’t good.’ ”
Bowman decided to fly higher. “He was like, ‘We’re going to crash into the side of the mountain. I can’t see anything that’s going on,’ ” she told CNN.
“I was scared,” she said. She said she sent a text message to her boyfriend: “If I die, remember I love you.” Then she said she hunkered down in fear.
For two days, Veatch was lost somewhere near the North Cascades National Park in northern Washington, not far from the Canadian border, sliding over rocks and slipping down a waterfall before eventually emerging from the dense woods and hitchhiking her way to a small-town general store.
Veatch said she stayed near the crash site for a while. “I was just blaming myself because the flight was to take me home — and there wasn’t anything I could do,” she told NBC News. “It took me a long time to realize that they would be happy that at least I made it out.” She said she knew she had to start moving and her instinct was to head downhill. So she starting searching for water — a skill learned watching survivor shows on TV with her father.
She spotted drainage and followed it to a stream. She followed the stream to a path called Easy Pass Trail, which the Washington Trails Association defines as “anything but easy.” It has a gain in elevation of about 840 metres.
Veatch said she kept crying. “It started feeling a little bit hopeless ’cause I had no idea where I was at all, like no clue,” she told NBC News.
The second night she slept in a sandbank. She woke up covered in bug bites and chilled to the bone, so much so she was scared she would die of hypothermia. She was covered in bruises and scratches. Her hair was singed. Her hands had second-degree burns from trying to rescue her grandfather.
“I just got this surge of willpower and was like ‘There’s no way I can die without hugging somebody again,’ ” she told the news station.
Veatch took the trail to a road near the east entrance to North Cascades National Park, called North Cascades Highway, family friend Santina Lampman told the Seattle Times. Monday afternoon, a driver saw her sitting at the trail head, picked her up and took her to a general store in Mazama, a small town in the Methow Valley near the Canadian border.
From there, a store employee helped her call 911.
“I was riding from Kalispell, Mont., to Bellingham, Wash.,” she told the dispatcher. “I don’t know where, but we crashed and I was the only one that made it out. The only one that survived.”
Veatch was taken to a nearby hospital where she was treated for second-degree burns and dehydration. She also suffered a temporary muscle tissue breakdown. She was released from the hospital Tuesday.
On Wednesday, search crews found the plane, which was still smouldering. Skagit County deputy coroner Matthew Sias said the bodies were burned beyond recognition. Authorities will use dental records to confirm the identities. The cause of death was listed as “blunt trauma.”
“I know they’re with me but still, I’m going to miss them,” Veatch told NBC News about her stepgrandparents. “They did so much for me.
“I have such a new-found respect for life now,” she said. “Spending three days wishing nothing more than to just be alive and do simple things . . . every little thing makes me feel so incredibly grateful.”