Ganesh Kendale
A women found herself trapped upside down in a narrow crevice between two boulders after dropping her phone while taking pictures at Australia’s Hunter Valley region.
The New South Wales Ambulance service shared details of the challenging rescue operation on their Instagram account describing how the 23-year-old, identified as Matilda Campbell, was literally “between a rock and a hard place.”
The rescue operation took a total of seven hours to free her from the roughly three-metre (10-foot) crevice.
Peter Watts, the specialist rescue paramedic involved, noted that in his decade-long career, he had never faced a case quite like this.Campbell’s friends had to trek to a location with better phone reception to alert emergency responders after their attempts to free her had failed.
The rescue operation required a multidisciplinary team effort, with Watts praising their collaborative approach. To ensure stability and create a safe access point, rescuers constructed a hardwood frame and carefully removed several heavy boulders. The most challenging part of the rescue involved guiding Campbell through a tight “S” bend, which took over an hour. A specialized winch was also employed to move a massive 500-kilogram (1,100-pound) boulder out of the way.
Throughout the ordeal, Campbell remained calm and cooperative, assisting the rescuers in their efforts to free her. “Anything we asked her to do, she was able to do to help us get her out,” Watts noted. Fortunately, Campbell was freed with only minor scratches and bruises, although her phone was unfortunately left behind in the crevice.
Following the incident, Campbell took to Facebook to share a light-hearted post, featuring a photo taken during her rescue that showed her soles wedged between the boulders. She humorously captioned the image, “Not my feet on display like that,” accompanied by a laughing emoji. In another post, she jokingly reflected on her accident-prone nature and said, “No more rock exploration for me for a while.”
