A woman was rescued after she spent seven long hours wedged upside down in a crevice between two boulders after she got stuck trying to retrieve her phone in Australia’s Hunter Valley.
The woman slipped into a 10-foot crevice between two boulders this month but ended up hanging by her feet upside down and unable to get out, the New South Wales Ambulance service said in a news release. Hunter Valley is north of Sydney in New South Wales.
Her friends tried to free her, to no avail, and after she had been hanging upside down for over an hour, they called Triple Zero, Australia’s emergency call number.
NSW Ambulance responded with a team to remove heavy boulders to create a "safe access point," the release said.
“With care, a hardwood frame was built to ensure stability while rescuers worked,” the service said. “The team faced the challenge of navigating the patient out through a tight 'S' bend over the course of an hour. It took teamwork and a specialised Tirfor winch to move a massive 500 kg boulder (1,100 lbs).”
NSW Ambulance shared photos showing the woman's bare feet sticking out between the small gap in the boulders and first responders removing the giant rocks to reach her.
NSW Ambulance Specialist Rescue Paramedic Peter Watts said that in his 10 years as a rescue paramedic, “I had never encountered a job quite like this, it was challenging but incredibly rewarding.”
The Australian Broadcasting Corp. named the woman as Matilda Campbell, 23, and reported that she remained calm and cooperative despite her ordeal.
“She was such a trooper,” Watts told the outlet. “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.”
In total, crews had to remove seven boulders weighing 80 to 500 kilograms (176 to 1,100 pounds), the outlet reported.
The woman was finally safely freed after she had been stuck for seven hours — and she came away with just minor scratches and bruises.
However, in the end she was unable to retrieve her phone.