A hiker was rescued last week after she slid hundreds of feet down an Adirondack mountain peak and clung to a spruce tree above a sheer cliff face in freezing rain, officials said Wednesday.
The 46-year-old woman, who was not publicly identified, called forest rangers for help around 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 26, saying that she had slipped off the summit of South Dix Mountain in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation said.
She told rangers that she had tumbled several hundred feet through steep snow and a rockslide until she grabbed a small spruce tree to stop herself from going over the edge of a cliff, the agency said.
Rangers had the woman call 911 to acquire her coordinates and told her to find a way to keep warm since it would be hours until they could reach her in the mountains.
"She quite honestly thought she was going to die up there," Ranger Jamison Martin said in a video describing the incident. "She was just petrified to move in any direction; she obviously wasn’t going any further down, but she couldn’t get herself back up the rock slab. She basically felt like she was totally stuck."
Martin described the conditions as treacherous, with temperatures in the low 30s, pouring rain, deep snow and slippery ice – what he called hypothermia weather.
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Martin and another ranger reached the woman at 1:30 a.m., providing her with warm liquids, food and dry clothing. The rangers then guided the hiker out of the vegetation and back to the trail so they could descend the mountain.
The rangers and hiker reached her vehicle at 6:30 a.m., the agency said. No further details about the hiker’s condition were immediately released.
Martin said the woman was an experienced hiker who has ascended all 46 of the Adirondack High Peaks over 4,000 feet high twice before and was working on her third go-around.
