Body and wreckage of airplane found southwest of Lake Tahoe

A missing aircraft and its pilot were located Tuesday at 4:15 p.m. in a rugged area of the Sierra Nevada southwest of Lake Schmidell, which is west of Maggie's Peak and Lake Tahoe.

Searchers found the wreckage as a result of a photograph taken by a Civil Air Patrol crew who was flying in the probable location of the missing aircraft. The coordinates from the photograph were passed along to the El Dorado County Sheriff’s ground team who hiked into the site and confirmed the crashed aircraft and a deceased male victim outside of the plane.

Officially the identity of the deceased man will be determined by the Coroner according to the El Dorado County Sheriff's Office but friends and family are saying 52-year-old Tyrell Kremer was the pilot of the missing single-engine Cessna. The plane and pilot left Idaho on Saturday and was headed to Westover Field in Amador County when it apparently hit bad weather. Kremer is a resident of Wilton, Calif., a suburb of Sacramento.

“This was truly a team effort between CAP and the El Dorado County Sheriff,” said Incident Commander Major Shane Terpstra. “While we didn’t get the outcome we had hoped for, the locating of the crash and recovery of the victim allows the family to begin the grieving process and gives them a sense of closure. Our condolences go out to the victim’s family.”

The search for the missing aircraft was called off Sunday because of stormy weather and resumed from the ground on Monday, and the air on Tuesday.

No other details are available at this time.