text: Teenager Autumn Veatch, one of three passengers on a missing plane presumed crashed in the North Cascades, survived in rugged terrain for two days before being found and taken to an Okanogan County hospital Monday with minor injuries. 
   
   BELLINGHAM — The voice on the phone was a miracle. 
   
   It wasn’t another reporter, wasn’t search-and-rescue officials, wasn’t more supportive friends. 
   
   It was Autumn Veatch, 16, calling Monday from a hospital in Brewster, Okanogan County, telling her father, David Veatch, and friends an unbelievable tale of survival. 
   
   It was a voice most of them had privately feared they would never hear again. 
   
   Autumn Veatch was not, as many had feared, dead in a small-plane crash in the North Cascades. She was alive, and aside from some minor burns, dehydration and exhaustion from a two-day ordeal that surely will qualify as an epic survival tale, Autumn was OK. 
   
   And she was more than ready to come home, she told her father and family friends gathered around a speakerphone in the family’s Bellingham apartment. 
   
   “I just can’t believe she went through all that she did,” the 49-year-old father said late Monday after driving four hours to the hospital. 
   
   Details of her ordeal during the brief hospital call were sparse, but rejoicing was immense, said Santina Lampman, a longtime family friend in the room Monday afternoon who later recounted the call to The Seattle Times. 
   
   During the call, Autumn quickly explained how the small plane she’d been traveling in with her step-grandparents, Leland and Sharon Bowman, of Marion, Mont., had crashed in the rugged North Cascades. Autumn somehow survived the impact and futilely tried to pull the Bowmans from the wreckage. 
   
   She stuck by the scene for some time, hoping for help, Autumn told them. But ultimately, she decided she needed to get out of the mountains on her own. 
   
   The Bellingham High School junior-to-be had little outdoor training, but she did what survival experts probably would have advised: She followed drainage down to a river, then the river, via a trail, downstream to the nearest road, Lampman said. 
   
   Authorities identified the trail as the Easy Pass trail, a popular but difficult hike in the rugged mountain terrain. It led Autumn to Highway 20, the North Cascades Highway, where she caught a ride with hikers to the nearest community — Mazama, in the Methow Valley — and contacted authorities. 
   
   Listen to the 911 call 
   
   When Autumn walked into the Mazama Store on Monday, store manager Serena Lockwood said she looked “dazed and not fully aware of what was going on.” 
   
   C.B. Thomas, the first responder from Aero Methow and another manager at the store, said Veatch arrived at 2:45 p.m. wearing a loose sweater, jeans and sneakers. He said she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for “about three days.” 
   
   “She was obviously upset and distraught,” Thomas said. “She was shaking. She was certainly able to communicate her situation and kind of apologized for being upset and not speaking clearly.” 
   
   She was taken to Three Rivers Hospital in Brewster with non-life-threatening injuries, but she was suffering from dehydration and exposure to the elements, officials said. She was admitted overnight and diagnosed with treatable rhabdomyolysis, a breakdown of muscle tissue that leads to damaging protein in the blood. 
   
   Autumn was pretty “drugged up” when Veatch and two family friends arrived at the hospital late Monday, but she seemed happy to see them, he said. She had one request: McDonald’s. 
   
   “I hear there’s one down the hill,” Veatch said. “I’m going to get her nuggets.” 
   
   During her phone call home to her father, Autumn’s brief description of the crash gave the impression that the Bowmans died “on impact, or shortly after,” Lampman said. 
   
   Authorities have not confirmed the conditions of Leland Bowman, 62, and Sharon Bowman, 63, as of Monday night. 
   
   Veatch said he had never met Autumn’s step-grandparents, but he knew that Autumn thought they were wonderful. 
   
   “These people were really playing the part of grandparents,” he said. 
   
   He declined to comment on whether he knew anything about the crash. 
   
   The couple’s downed plane hadn’t been found by Tuesday morning, according to WSDOT Emergency Management and Security Coordinator John Himmel. But information provided by Autumn helped narrow down the search area where the plane is believed to have crashed, officials said. 
   
   Searching for the plane is difficult because authorities are dealing with “rocks and trees and lots of nooks and crannies,” Himmel added. 
   
   “Probably the most difficult terrain to try and do the search in the state of Washington,” he said. 
   
   The Beech A-35 left Montana about 1 p.m. PDT Saturday. Family members notified authorities when the plane did not arrive. 
   
   The plane crossed the Idaho-Washington border about 2:20 p.m. PDT Saturday, but it dropped off the radar near Omak, Okanogan County, about an hour later, transportation officials said. The last cellphone signal from one of the plane’s occupants was detected around 3:50 p.m. 
   
   During her call home Monday, both Autumn and her father were understandably overwhelmed, Lampman said. 
   
   “I think she’s just happy she’s alive,” said Lampman, a former neighbor of the Veatches’ whose daughter, Amber Shockey, has been a friend of Autumn’s since first grade. “She did joke that it was a good thing she’d watched all those ‘Survivor’ shows that she didn’t like, but her dad made her watch anyway.” 
   
   The Easy Pass trail has a gain in elevation of 2,800 feet, according to the Washington Trails Association, which called it “anything but easy” on its website and described one portion of the trail as “quite a climb.” 
   
   The trail was originally called “Easy” Pass because it was the only place to put a trail across “ragged ridges” in the area, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 
   
   The Lampmans were at the Veatches’ apartment at 5 p.m. Monday when David Veatch left, with friends, for the four-hour drive on Highway 20 to reunite with Autumn and bring her home. They arrived late Monday. 
   
   The jubilation over Autumn’s survival was tinged with regret at the possible deaths of the Bowmans. 
   
   “I feel terrible for the family of the grandparents,” Lampman said. 
   
   Autumn Veatch, a former Sehome High School student, continued to live with her father after her parents divorced and her mother, Misty Bowman, relocated to Montana a couple of years ago, friends said. The mother declined to comment Monday night. 
   
   “She’s an amazing, witty, creative, loving human being,” said Chelsey Clark, a family friend of Autumn’s and her father. “She loves art, she’s amazing at drawing, she loves music and she’s a quirky, sarcastic girl.” 
   
   Even as Autumn was making her way out of the mountains, a data trail from previous activity on her cellphone was helping searchers locate the plane’s last known position. 
   
   Lampman’s 16-year-old daughter provided searchers with screen grabs of times and contents of Autumn’s last text messages to her friends — apparently providing the last known cell signal used to establish a search area, Lampman said. 
   
   When Amber heard the news that her friend was alive, “She lost it. She freaked out,” Lampman said. 
   
   Several hours after Autumn’s phone call Monday, her friends still seemed in a state of giddy shock that she was likely to be on her way home soon. 
   
   “We were refusing to accept” that she was gone, Lampman said. “We never really lost hope.” ||||| SEATTLE (AP) — A teenage girl who survived a small-plane crash in the craggy, thickly forested mountains of north-central Washington state emerged from the wilderness after hiking "for a couple of days" and was picked up by a motorist who drove her to safety, authorities said Monday. But the fate of her two step-grandparents, who were also on board, remained unclear. 
   
   David Veatch, father of Bellingham High student Autumn Veatch, 16, talks to the media at the Civil Air Patrol station at Bellingham International Airport in Bellingham, Wash., Monday, July 13, 2015. Autumn... (Associated Press) 
   
   Family members alerted authorities after the Beech A-35 failed to complete its flight from Kalispell, Montana, to Lynden, Washington, on Saturday afternoon. Rescuers narrowed down a search area based on cellphone data and typical flight patterns. But there was no sign of the aircraft or its occupants until Autumn Veatch, 16, followed a trail to state Route 20, near the east entrance to North Cascades National Park. 
   
   A motorist picked her up Monday afternoon and drove her 30 miles east to a general store in Mazama, where employees called 911. The Aero Methow Rescue Service sent a paramedic team to check her out before she was taken to a hospital in Brewster for treatment of what appeared to be minor injuries, said Cindy Button, director of services at the organization. 
   
   "Our initial information is she sustained no life-threatening injuries and is somewhat dehydrated due to being out in the elements," said Scott Graham, CEO of Three Rivers Hospital. 
   
   Okanogan County Sheriff Frank Rogers said Monday afternoon that the girl had been "walking for a couple of days." He declined to comment on the status of the other two people aboard the plane. 
   
   Serena Lockwood, the manager at the Mazama Store, said the girl and a motorist came in Monday afternoon, saying she had been in a plane crash. 
   
   "She was obviously pretty traumatized," Lockwood said. 
   
   Rescuers celebrated Veatch's survival, but they immediately returned their focus to finding the wreckage, aided by Veatch's description of the crash site, said Lt. Col. Jeffrey Lustick of the Civil Air Patrol. Lustick said he could not confirm any details about the condition of the grandparents, Leland and Sharon Bowman of Marion, Montana. 
   
   "We're so happy about this," Lustick said. "I've spent 30 years in the Civil Air Patrol and in search-and-rescue. Moments of joy like this can be hard to find." 
   
   Lustick said he had spoken with Veatch's father, who said his daughter told him the plane crashed and caught fire after flying into a bank of clouds. She remained at the crash site for a day before deciding to hike down, eventually finding a trail and following it to the trailhead on Highway 20. 
   
   Five aircraft equipped with special radios for detecting the missing plane's emergency-locator transmitter searched the mountains Monday, while ground crews focused on areas between Mazama and Rainy Pass, officials said. The planes halted their search for the night by 8 p.m. while a couple of Navy helicopters from the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station continued to sweep the area, said Barbara LaBoe, a state Transportation Department spokeswoman. 
   
   The crashed plane crossed the Idaho-Washington border about 2:20 p.m. PDT Saturday, but it dropped off the radar near Omak, Washington, about an hour later, transportation officials said. The last phone signal from one of the plane's occupants was detected around 3:50 p.m. 
   
   ___ 
   
   Associated Press writer Phuong Le contributed to this report.
target: – A 16-year-old girl in Washington state is bruised and dehydrated but very much alive after surviving a plane crash and a long trek through what authorities describe as some of the state's most rugged terrain. Autumn Veatch was on a small plane with her step-grandparents that crashed after departing Kalispell, Mont., on Saturday afternoon, the Bellingham Herald reports. There was no sign of the plane or its occupants until a motorist found Veatch on State Route 20 yesterday afternoon and took her to a general store, where employees called authorities, the AP reports. She was hospitalized with minor injuries. Her father tells the Herald that after the plane crashed into a mountain, it caught fire and she was unable to get her step-grandparents out. She spent about a day near the plane waiting for rescue before following a stream and then a trail out of the woods, her father says. Friends say both father and daughter are completely overwhelmed. "She did joke that it was a good thing she'd watched all those Survivor shows that she didn't like, but her dad made her watch anyway," a family friend tells the Seattle Times. Authorities are still searching for the missing Beech A-35. (In Colombia last month, a mother and baby survived four days in the jungle after a plane crash.)