A young Australian woman spent hours trapped upside down after slipping between two boulders when she tried to retrieve her mobile phone during a hike in her home country.
Matilda Campbell, the woman in question, was walking in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley region earlier this month when she fell into a three-metre crevice.
Little did she know that mishap would be the beginning of a seven-hour ordeal which would see emergency services take on a “challenging” rescue that would even involve moving several boulders.
Peter Watts, a paramedic working at the New South Wales Ambulance service, had according to a press release on the service’s social media pages, said:
“In my 10 years as a rescue paramedic I had never encountered a job quite like this, it was challenging but incredibly rewarding.”
This was because even after the rescue officials managed to hoist a 500kg (1,100lb) rock out the way, they still had the unusual task of figuring out how to get the woman out of the “S” bend she had unwittingly found herself in.
The New South Wales Ambulance service further remarked on how she had already been upside down for over an hour before rescuers arrived, as her friends’ initial attempts to free her from the crevice proving unsuccessful.
Images shared by the ambulance service showed her hanging between the boulders by her feet, as well as the complex efforts to keep the area steady as emergency services tried to create a gap big enough to free her.
Surprisingly, the rescued woman walked away with just minor scratches and bruises, according to NSW Ambulance but she however, did not manage to retrieve her phone.
Campbell had afterwards gushed online over the successful rescue operation saying,
“Thank you to the team who saved me you guys are literally life savers. Too bad about the phone tho.”
This incident is reminiscent of the tragic Nutty Putty Cave misadventure involving John Jones in 2009. Jones became trapped upside down in a narrow passage and, despite extensive rescue efforts, could not be freed. His story serves as a sobering reminder of the potential dangers of exploring confined spaces.
