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Woman reaching for phone gets stuck upside down in boulders

NSW Ambulance The bottoms of two feet visible between two large boulders. A pair of shoes can be seen to the side inside the creviceNSW Ambulance
The woman slipped into a three-metre crevice

A young woman spent hours trapped upside down after slipping between two boulders as she tried to retrieve her mobile phone during a hike in Australia.

The woman - named in reports as Matilda Campbell - was walking in New South Wales' Hunter Valley region earlier this month when she fell into the three-metre crevice.

It was the start of a seven-hour ordeal which would see emergency services undertake a "challenging" rescue - including moving several boulders.

And even after managing to winch a 500kg (1,100lb) rock out the way, they still had to work out how to get the woman out of the "S" bend she had found herself in.

“In my 10 years as a rescue paramedic I had never encountered a job quite like this, it was challenging but incredibly rewarding,” Peter Watts, a paramedic with New South Wales Ambulance service, said, according to a release on the service's social media pages.

She had already been upside down for more than an hour before rescuers arrived, her friends' initial attempts to free her having been unsuccessful.

Photos shared by the ambulance service show her hanging between the boulders by her feet, as well as the complicated efforts to keep the area stable as emergency services tried to create a gap big enough to free her.

NSW Ambulance A boulder with a yellow strap around it, being lifted out from between two other boulders. A person with a helmet can be seen in the crevice, while another person's legs can be seen beside the creviceNSW Ambulance
A winch had to be used to lever the largest boulders out the way
NSW Ambulance Four men - a police officer, a paramedic, a man in a white suit and another in a green top reading VAL Rescue - stand next to a large boulder in a wood. Pieces of wood used to make the rocks secure can be seen, as well as mechanical equipmentNSW Ambulance
Emergency workers had to pull together to get the woman out

Mr Watts later described the young woman as a "trooper" in an interview with Australia's ABC.

"We were all like, how did you get down there - and how are we going to get her out?"

Unbelievably, the rescued woman was left with just minor scratches and bruises, NSW Ambulance said.

She did not, however, manage to retrieve her phone.

"Thank you to the team who saved me you guys are literally life savers," she wrote in a message online.

"Too bad about the phone tho."