World
Australian woman stuck upside down between boulders for seven hours after trying to retrieve phone
She certainly landed between a rock and a hard place.
An Australian woman managed to find herself trapped upside down between two boulders for a staggering seven hours after she slipped while trying to retrieve her dropped phone.
Matilda Campbell, 23, fell head first into the 9-foot-deep crevice while she was hiking with friends in the Hunter Valley, 75 miles north of Sydney, earlier this month, authorities said.
With no cell service in the area, her friends spent an hour trying to free her themselves before eventually going off to call for help.
When rescue crews arrived, they had to build a hardwood frame to keep them stable as they worked to move several heavy boulders.
At one point, they had to hoist up one rock that weighed a whopping 1,000 pounds.
“It was an out-of-the-box rescue, that’s for sure,” Peter Watts, a NSW Ambulance specialist rescue paramedic, told Australia’s ABC network.
“I’ve never been to one in 10 years like that.”
A series of photos released by first responders showed the young woman dangling upside down by her feet — with her sneakers abandoned close by — before they managed to pull her out.
“She was such a trooper,” Watts said.
“I would have been beside myself stuck in that sort of situation, but when we were there she was calm, she was collected, anything we asked her to do she was able to do it to help us get her out.”
“I was very impressed with how chilled she was,” he added.
Campbell managed to survive the ordeal with just a few minor scratches and bruises.
Sadly, though, her phone couldn’t be saved.
“Thank you to the team who saved me,” Campbell wrote on social media in the aftermath.
“You guys are literally lifesavers … too bad about the phone though.”