A woman taking pictures in Australia’s Hunter Valley region dropped her phone — and then slipped into a rock crevice, where she was stuck upside-down as emergency responders tried to free her.
She found herself literally “between a rock and a hard place” – caught between two boulders in a roughly three-metre crevice on Oct. 12, the ambulance service of New South Wales said in a Facebook post Monday.
By the time emergency responders arrived, she was hanging by her feet for over an hour. It took seven hours to rescue her.
While the service did not name the woman, local media identified her as 23-year-old Matilda Campbell.
“Not my feet on display like that,” Campbell wrote in a Facebook post Tuesday with a laughing face emoji, alongside a photo taken during the rescue showing the soles of her feet wedged in a narrow space between two boulders.
In a separate Facebook post, Campbell described herself as highly accident-prone and vowed “no more rock exploration for me for a while.”
NSW Ambulance and Campbell did not immediately return a request for comment late Tuesday local time.
“In my 10 years as a rescue paramedic I had never encountered a job quite like this,” Peter Watts, the specialist rescue paramedic who worked to free her, said in the release. “It was challenging but incredibly rewarding.”
Campbell’s friends contacted emergency responders after “unsuccessful attempts to free her,” the service said. Limited phone reception in the area meant they had to find a location where they could call emergency services for help, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
Watts said the multidisciplinary team “all worked incredibly well together to achieve a good outcome for the patient.”
Rescuers, who built a hardwood frame to ensure stability during the operation, worked to remove several heavy boulders to create a safe access point.
Once they could access both of her feet, it took rescuers more than an hour to navigate her out through a tight “S” bend, the service said, calling the scenario an “unlikely predicament.”
They needed a specialized winch to move a massive 500-kilogram boulder.
Watts told ABC News that the woman was “calm” and “collected” despite being stuck upside down among the rocks. “Anything we asked her to do she was able to do it to help us get her out,” he said.
Campbell said she was recovering and thanked her friends and the rescue team for working “so hard” to free her. “I’m forever thankful as most likely I would not be here today,” she wrote.
The ambulance service said she was freed with only minor scratches and bruises — but was unable to retrieve her phone.