'It Was an Out-of-the-Box Rescue, That's For Sure'

A woman was trapped hanging upside down by her feet, wedged in a narrow chute between two boulders, for about seven hours before she could be rescued in Australia this month. Matilda Campbell, 23, initially dropped her phone in a crevice while walking with friends on private property in Laguna, New South Wales, about 75 miles from the state capital of Sydney, per CNN. She bent down to retrieve the phone but then fell face-first into a 10-foot-deep crevice between two boulders, leaving only the bottoms of her feet visible to those above, the outlet reports. Unable to reach the woman or find cell service, her companions went in search of help.

It ended up being a multiagency response. "We were all like, 'How did she get down there and how are we going to get her out?'" NSW Ambulance specialist rescue paramedic Peter Watts, among the first on the scene, tells ABC Australia. Campbell had slipped face-first through a 4-inch gap in the boulders and "slid about [10 feet] down a chute and got stuck," Watts adds, per CNN. Rescuers "determined the only way to get her out is to come out vertically," Watts says, which meant moving seven large boulders, some weighing more than 1,000 pounds. The process, helped by a winch, took seven hours.

"We were concerned that anytime we moved a rock, if it fell in the wrong direction, it was going to fall down on top of her," Watts tells CNN. But "she was so calm and collected through the whole thing." Once the boulders were moved, rescuers had to manipulate Campbell's body to get her out of the chute, which ran in an "S" shape. "It was an out-of-the-box rescue, that's for sure," Watts tells ABC. Campbell eventually emerged dizzy and unable to walk, as the blood had drained out of her legs, but she suffered only scratches and bruises. "You guys are literally lifesavers," she wrote to rescuers on social media, per ABC. "Too bad about the phone though." It remains somewhere in the rock pile, CNN reports. (More Australia stories.)