Lucky escape for hiker trapped upside down for seven hours

Photographs showed the 23-year-old’s feet poking through the crevice during her ordeal. Photo / NSW Ambulance
An Australian woman who fell into a rock crevice while trying to retrieve her mobile phone spent seven hours hanging upside down before she was finally rescued.
Matilda Campbell was hiking with friends in bushland in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, when she accidentally dropped her device.
But while trying to recover it she slipped and fell 10ft (3 metres), and ended up wedged upside down between two large boulders.
Photographs of her ordeal showed the crack in the rocks with only the soles of her bare feet visible.
After her friends made a desperate, failed attempt to rescue her, one of them hiked to a position where there was phone reception and called emergency services for help.
Dozens of police, paramedics, firefighters and rescue experts from the nearby town of Cessnock, north of Sydney, then rushed to the scene.
Crews had to remove seven large boulders, some of them weighing 500kg, to reach Campbell.
Rescuers also built a wooden frame to protect her from any falling rocks before they were finally able to free her.
Emergency personnel praised Campbell for her stoicism and resilience as she hung upside down in the gap.
“She was such a trooper,” said Peter Watts, a rescue paramedic from the New South Wales ambulance service.
“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 told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Speaking on Facebook after the incident, Campbell said: “I wanted to give the biggest shout-out to my friends, the team who worked so hard to get me out.
“I’m forever thankful as most likely I would not be here today.”
She added: “I love you guys and you mean the world to me.”
Watts added: “It was an out-of-the-box rescue, that’s for sure. Everyone had to bounce ideas off each other – we were all like: ‘How did she get down there and how are we going to get her out?’
“I’ve never been to one in 10 years like that.”
Despite her ordeal, Campbell suffered only minor scratches and bruises – although it appears her mobile phone has been lost forever.
Thanking her rescuers on social media, she wrote: “You guys are literally lifesavers … too bad about the phone though.”