Pilot Hikes 9 Days Over Sierra After Crash : Survival: Long Beach man, ragged and bruised but otherwise OK, walks into a cafe in Inyo County. Searchers are led back to the plane, where two passengers are found dead.

A Long Beach pilot missing with two companions since the Thanksgiving weekend survived a plane crash in the frigid High Sierra and trudged for nine days across miles of mountainous terrain before showing up Friday at a cafe in Inyo County. His two passengers were later found dead.

Peter DeLeo, 33, scratched, weary and wrapped in ragged ski clothes--showed up at the Ranch House Cafe in Olancha, about 200 miles north of Los Angeles, almost two weeks after his single-engine plane vanished over the steep, high-altitude backcountry of eastern Tulare County.

“Do you believe in miracles? Well, you should now,” said Lt. Col. Sidney Wolfe of the Civil Air Patrol. “They make movies about this stuff.”

Just a few hours later, DeLeo boarded a plane and led searchers back to the downed plane, which they found in a ravine at the 8,000-foot level near Kern Peak in Inyo County, about 20 miles west of the cafe on U.S. 395. His companions, Waverly Hatch, 49, and Lloyd Matsumoto, 55, were found in and near the wreckage.

DeLeo was back in Long Beach on Friday night in seclusion with his family. A family friend who answered the phone, said, “He’s banged up, but he’s all right.”

“I asked him how he survived,” said Bill Woodward, manager of the Lone Pine Airport. “He said ‘sheer determination.’

“He stayed on the sunny side of the mountains” during the day, Woodward said, adding that DeLeo traveled above the tree line in hopes that searchers would see him. “He kept bundled up in the brush at night . . . (and) he ate snow,” Woodward said.

“We figure he walked 35 to 40 miles, given the terrain,” said Cpl. Scott Stell of the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department.

Late Thursday, after cresting the snow-covered spine of the Sierra at an altitude of 9,000 feet or higher, DeLeo spotted lights on U.S. 395 from a ridge and stumbled his way down in the dark. DeLeo made his way to the highway, where he flagged down a motorist. “He was . . . waving and screaming, and said he was in a plane crash and hadn’t eaten anything for days,” said Jennifer Homan, manager of the Ranch House Cafe.

The pilot arrived at the cafe in a tattered ski jacket and snow boots. Despite cuts on his hands and face and an arm too sore to move, DeLeo refused medical treatment, witnesses said. He thought his friends had already been rescued, authorities said.

“He was under the impression that we had already found these people because he had seen aircraft flying in the area,” said an Inyo County sheriff’s spokesman. “But they never noticed (the wreckage) because of the area.”

DeLeo told authorities that he had stayed with his companions for a few days, and they were alive when he began his journey.

“One of the passengers had walked away from the airplane a short distance and expired. The other passenger had expired in the aircraft,” Wolfe said.

Before heading back to locate the wreckage, DeLeo called home and left a message on a recording machine, said his brother, Rocco DeLeo of New York.

“I’m not surprised that he made it out,” Rocco DeLeo said, adding that he had been teaching his brother to rock- and ice-climb.

“My brother is a survivalist. He thrives on it,” Rocco DeLeo said.

A sheriff’s spokesman said DeLeo believed that his plane had fallen victim to wind shear, a sudden, dramatic change in the direction and speed in which air is moving.

The National Transportation and Safety Board is investigating the crash of the single-engine, four-seat Maule M-5.

DeLeo is an entrepreneur. Hatch was a pilot and a certified aviation mechanic, and Matsumoto was a counselor. The three reportedly took the plane trip to photograph the Sierra. They had taken the same trip a week earlier.

The last contact with DeLeo had been a radio transmission received at Kern Valley Airport about four hours after DeLeo left Long Beach Municipal Airport on Nov. 27.

Times correspondent Emelyn Cruz and the Associated Press contributed to this story.

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Trek Through Wilderness The pilot of a single-engine plane that crashed near Kern Peak hiked for nine days over miles of cold, rugged terrain to Olancha.