New York Hiker Fell ‘Several Hundred Feet’ Down Steep Snow, Clung to Small Tree for Hours, Nearly Went Off Vertical Cliff

A New York woman hung over a cliff for about seven hours as she awaited a rescue team to extract her, clinging onto a tree to stay alive. 

The Department of Environmental Conservation said in a news release that the woman, on December 26, had slipped off the summit of the South Dix Mountain in North Hudson, a town located about 100 miles north of Albany.

Rangers said the woman, unidentified publicly by name, “had fallen several hundred feet down steep snow and a rockslide before grabbing a small spruce tree, which prevented her from going over a vertical cliff face.” 

The woman, 46 and from South Glens Falls in New York, had been hiking at the time. 

When she slipped, weather conditions were “treacherous,” the release says. 

There was “pouring rain, soaking wet spruce tree cover, deep snow, and slippery ice.”

Rangers with the Department of Environmental Conservation were alerted to her status at around 5:30 p.m. that day. 

They were able to reach her vehicle at 6:30 p.m., but they couldn’t make it up to her position until around 1:30 a.m., leaving her clinging to the tree branch for about seven hours. 

Ranger Jamison Martin said in a video describing the rescue that the temperature around the time had been hovering around the low 30s, characterizing it as “freezing cold.”

“It’s brutal,” he said. “It’s basically what we call hypothermia weather.”

He said the woman survived because she grabbed onto the small tree and she was “petrified” to move. She was an experienced hiker and came prepared with an emergency blanket and other essentials, but the rain made conditions even harder.

The hiker “quite honestly thought she was gonna die up there,” he said.