‘All we could see was the soles of her feet’: Woman stuck for 7 hours after dropping phone in crevice

Drop your phone? Of course, pick it up.

Drop your phone down a narrow crevice between two boulders on a jagged hillside? Maybe think twice before going after it.

An Australian woman was rescued earlier this month after getting stuck upside down, wedged between two boulders while trying to retrieve her phone. According to a Facebook post by NSW Ambulance, the woman “got herself in a spot of bother” after she fell into a three-metre crevice in the Hunter Valley, a region north of Sydney known for its wineries and walking trails.

“With no phone reception and unable to call for help herself, her friends called Triple Zero [Australia’s emergency line] after unsuccessful attempts to free her — the patient was hanging by her feet upside down for over an hour by this point,” reads the statement posted on Monday.

A multidisciplinary team worked to remove “several heavy boulders” to create an access point, built a hardwood frame for stability, and then had to navigate the woman out through a “tight S-bend,” the statement explains.

She was stuck for seven hours before she was eventually freed “with only minor scratches and bruises,” the statement said.

She was, however, unable to retrieve her phone.

“In my 10 years as a rescue paramedic I had never encountered a job quite like this, it was challenging but incredibly rewarding,” NSW ambulance specialist rescue paramedic Peter Watts said in the statement.

‘You think I meant to get stuck or something?’

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) identified the woman as 23-year-old Matilda Campbell, who told the news service she dropped her phone while taking pictures and slipped while going after it. She reportedly told 7 News  Australia that she’s accident-prone and plans to take a break from bush-walking.

“All we could see was the soles of her feet,” Watts told 7 News about the rescue.

In an Instagram post last week, Campbell shared photos of her injuries, writing, “how the night started vs the next day when i was stuck for 5 hours between rocks + a fractured vertebrae.”

The photo carousel starts out showing Campbell and two friends smiling in a selfie, and ends with images of gashes and bruises on her shoulder, back, arms and hip.

In an Instagram story, Campbell shared a screenshot of a threatening, profanity-laced DM that says she “put emergency services on the line for your stupidity.”

“Damn, you think I meant to get stuck or something??” she wrote in the story.

Campbell thanked her rescuers in a comment on NSW Ambulance’s Instagram post.

“Thank you to the team who saved me. You guys are literally lifesavers … too bad about the phone though.”