As John Murphy and his adult son and daughter flew north Wednesday morning, they anticipated carving down the slopes at Killington Ski Resort that afternoon.

With the plane packed with ski equipment, they took off from Martin State Airport in Middle River around 6 a.m. The forecast looked good before they took flight. It was supposed to take only 2 1/2 hours.

But around 8:15 a.m., just 15 minutes from their destination, John Murphy found himself flying into heavy clouds in southern Vermont.

A recreational pilot with about 375 hours of experience, he is rated to fly only when the visibility is good enough to see a mile — and suddenly it wasn’t. He decided to climb out of the clouds, steering his single-engine Piper plane up, up, up.

“Before I got out of the clouds, the plane became like a brick. It wouldn’t fly anymore because of the ice. When the plane wouldn’t fly anymore at 5,500 feet, we developed a stall,” Murphy said in an interview Friday. “I got into a stall spin, which is like the death spiral. We were doing 160 miles an hour straight at the ground.”

He said he recovered several times, only for the plane to stall again. It didn’t take long for him to realize he was no longer looking for a place to land but somewhere to crash.

“We’re gonna die!” his son Josiah Murphy yelled.

The snow-covered summit of Mount Equinox, at approximately 3,400 feet, came into view as they dropped out of the clouds.

“When we went through the trees, it ripped the wings off, which took away a lot of inertia,” John Murphy said. “We went through a couple smaller trees that slowed us down a little bit more, but as we broke them it kind of made a ramp up the hill.”

Several feet of snow-covered rocks prevented sparks as the plane skidded to a stop. All things considered, he said, it was “a relatively soft impact.”

“We climbed out of the plane and hugged and cried, realized we were alive and called 911,” John Murphy said.

Emergency officials in New York and Vermont credited the heavy snowpack with cushioning their crash and preventing serious injuries. The several feet of snow also made it more difficult for responders to reach the shocked family.

“It was cold up there. But we were planning for skiing, so we had ski clothes. So we bundled up as best we could,” John Murphy said. “Since it didn’t look like a fire hazard, we climbed back in the plane and just kind of huddled up.”

John Murphy, who lives in Allegany County but works in Baltimore selling diesel engine parts, said responders asked them to call every 30 minutes. But they had to call only two or three times before they heard a voice call out. It was a firefighter from the Manchester Fire Department, followed shortly by others.

“They started checking us out medically,” John Murphy said.

About 100 responders were involved in their rescue. Vermont doesn’t have emergency helicopters, so authorities called for New York State Police Aviation.

“It was a very heavily wooded area, but we found them,” said Maj. Jonathan Sperber, a New York State Police pilot.

Sperber and his colleagues had flown forest rangers from New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation to the crash site, lowering them to the top of the mountain.

“Walking up and seeing the fuselage down on the ground, it was really hard to believe that those subjects got themselves out,” forest ranger John Gullen said.

Responders hoisted the Murphys one at a time into a helicopter and flew them to the Manchester Fire Department. John Murphy said they drove his children to a hospital in an ambulance and flew him to a trauma center in Albany, New York, because “I looked the worst. I seemed to have more blood on me.”

In the end, John Murphy’s 25-year-old daughter, Cheyenne Murphy, who was sitting in the back seat, barely had a scratch, he said. Josiah Murphy, 24, who was sitting next to his father, had “severe whiplash” and was bleeding from the head, eventually requiring staples. John Murphy suffered a broken bone in his hand and “a little bit of whiplash.”

All were discharged by around 9 p.m. Wednesday. John Murphy’s wife drove from their home in Western Maryland to pick them up. The family returned home that night.

A jet engine mechanic in the 175th Air National Guard, Josiah Murphy is training to be a recreational pilot. Instructors showed him pictures of plane crashes in flight training as part of a lesson on crash landing, he said. Pilots should avoid crash landing on steep inclines and in trees.

“I was almost certain that we were going to die because that’s just what happens in those scenarios,” Josiah Murphy said.

John Murphy and his son drove back to Vermont to meet Friday morning with investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board. They hiked to the crash site. John Murphy said he wanted to help other pilots avoid his mistakes.

“This wouldn’t have happened if I made better decisions prior to getting in that weather,” he said.

Despite his approximately 10 years of flying, he added, “I’m inexperienced with icing. I didn’t understand how fast icing can form on a plane.”

He wishes he had shared a flight plan with the FAA before taking off and opted into air traffic control flight following, which would have given him traffic and weather updates. Both of those things are optional.

“I didn’t use that service and almost killed my children,” John Murphy said. “It’s help they offer you that I didn’t take. Had I done that, this could have been a day where I made it skiing.”

A totaled plane — he had it for only about a year — and a near-death experience won’t deter him from flying again. It’s a family tradition.

“‘Murphy family flying club,’ we call it,” he said. “It’s our family thing to do together.”