A woman hiking in Australia’s Hunter Valley found herself trapped upside down for seven hours when she attempted to reach for her phone, which had slipped between boulders. She was eventually rescued.
New South Wales (NSW) Ambulance service released photos of the rescue operation on Monday, showing the frightening predicament the woman found herself in.
In one of the pictures, only the woman’s bare feet can be seen as she is swallowed by a 4—or 5-foot-wide crack deep between the rocks.
The incident occurred on Oct. 12 when 23-year-old Matilda Campbell was bushwalking with friends down a slope near Cessnock, a small city about 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Sydney.
Then, Campbell dropped her phone. She slipped face-first 10 feet into a narrow crevice between two large boulders as she tried to retrieve it.
With no phone reception in the area, her friends first tried to free her, but there was little they could do. They left the area until they were able to call emergency services. By this time, Campbell had been suspended upside down for over an hour.
“My initial thought was, how are we going to get her out of here? Because I’ve never come across this,” NSW Ambulance rescue paramedic Peter Watts told CNN.
“In our ambulance rescue training, we’d cover some trench rescue, confined space rescue, and vertical rescue, and it was sort of an amalgamation of all those things in the one job.”
The area where Campbell got stuck was 160 feet down a slope and entirely inaccessible to vehicles.
“We all put our heads together and determined the only way to get her out is to come out vertically, which means we have to remove these rocks,” Watts said.
Moving the large rocks would be a delicate operation, for if one of them slipped or tilted the wrong way, Campbell could have been crushed.
For seven hours, police, ambulance, fire rescue workers, and volunteer rescue crews worked together to move the boulders aside. During this time, they advised Campbell to stay still out of fear that she might slip further down.
She kept calm throughout the rescue.
“She was so calm and collected through the whole thing. I was very impressed. I would have been frantic. She was not panicked whatsoever,” said Watts.
Six large boulders had to be moved before rescuers could physically touch her feet. The last one, an estimated 1,100-pound giant, proved the most challenging.
Once that was done, there was enough room to pull Campbell out, although that, too, was not as simple—the crevice she’d slipped in was not straight, so rescue workers couldn’t just lift her up and out.
“It was a bit of a maneuver to get all of her out of that little crevice,” said Watts.
At around 4:30 p.m., Campbell was freed. Being upside down for that long had left her dizzy, and she was initially unable to stand up, but aside from some minor scratching and bruising, she was unharmed.
“It’s safe to say i’m the most accidental prone person ever,” Campbell wrote on her Facebook page. “I am okay just have some injuries i’m recovering from, no more rock exploration for me for a while!”
Watts was relieved that the ordeal had met with a good ending.
“In my 10 years as a rescue paramedic I had never encountered a job quite like this, it was challenging but incredibly rewarding,” he said.
“Every agency had a role, and we all worked incredibly well together to achieve a good outcome for the patient.”
Campbell thanked her friends and the rescue workers.
“I’m forever thankful as most likely i would not be here today. I love you guys and you mean the world to me.”
The device that lured Campbell into danger—her phone—was not retrieved.