Woman stuck upside down between rocks for 7 hours after trying to retrieve her phone

A woman who tried to find her lost phone between boulders in Australia’s Hunter Valley was left upside down for seven hours before she was rescued earlier this month.

Photos of the incident posted on social media on Monday by the New South Wales (NSW) Ambulance Service showed only the bare soles of the woman’s feet.

The woman was walking with friends on private property in Laguna, a rural town in the Hunter Valley, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Sydney, when she dropped her phone.

While trying to pick it up, she slid face first into a three-meter (about 10 feet) crevice between two large boulders, so deep that her friends could not reach her. Emergency services have not officially released the woman’s name, but NSW Police said she was 23 years old.

NSW Ambulance paramedic Peter Watts told CNN there was no phone signal in the area so her friends had to leave her to call for help.

He was one of the first to arrive on the scene on the morning of October 12.

“My initial thought was: How are we going to get her out of here? Because I’ve never experienced this,” he told CNN.

“In our ambulance rescue training, we covered trench rescues, confined space rescues and vertical rescues, and it was kind of an amalgamation of all those things into one job.”

When Watts and others arrived, all they could see were the woman’s legs between a 10-centimeter (4-inch) gap in the rocks.

“When she got into that little hole, she slipped and rolled about three meters down the chute and got stuck,” Watts said.

The spot where she fell was about 50 meters (164 feet) down a bushy path inaccessible even to off-road vehicles.

“We all put our heads together and decided that the only way to get her out was to come out vertically, and that meant we had to remove these rocks,” Watts said.

Subtle rescue operation

Over the next seven hours, police, paramedics, firefighters and volunteer rescuers worked to free her.

Rescuers advised her to stay put – they were afraid that if she moved, she could slide further into the hole, making her even harder to get out.

It was already difficult enough to remove the surrounding rocks without digging deeper.

“We were concerned that every time we moved a rock, if it fell in the wrong direction, it would fall on top of her,” Watts said.

Six large boulders had to be removed before rescuers could get close enough to physically touch her feet, he said.

“She was so calm and collected throughout it all. I was very impressed. I would be furious. She didn’t feel any panic,” Watts said.

However, at times she seemed to go silent, he said.

They were concerned that she had been upside down for so long and may have suffered from excessive pressure on her limbs.

It took several hours before enough stone was removed so that rescuers could first gain access to one leg, then the other.

The last remaining boulder, weighing about 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds), proved difficult to move, Watts said.

“We used a winch to get it out of the way. We used wood on either side of it to keep it from wobbling and rolling through that little 4-inch gap until we moved it away,” Watts said.

They then began manipulating her body to pull her out of the pit.

“The chute she slid down didn’t go straight down, so we couldn’t pull her straight up,” Watts said.

She had to form an S-shape, placing her feet to one side, then the other.

“Once we extended her hips, we had to move her legs back to the left side to free up the shoulder. So it was kind of a maneuver to get her all out of that little hole.”

After her release, around 4:30 p.m. that day, Watts said she felt “100% relieved.”

“She was tired and very dizzy. All her blood was in her head and there was nothing in her legs, so she couldn’t stand or walk at that stage,” he said.

Miraculously, she escaped with only minor scratches and bruises.

The woman was taken to hospital for observation. However, her phone remains trapped between the stones.

For more CNN news and newsletters, create an account at CNN.com.