What To Do When You Are A Woman Alone In The Dark: Hiker with a Broken Ankle Tells it How It Is

It's a situation that any sane-minded person would not like to be in, but then not everyone is Lexi De Forest, who sat alone, in the dark, on top of a mountain in Wyoming one weekend after almost detaching her foot from her leg while climbing down the rock formations of Vedauwoo, Wyoming.

She had just watched the beautiful sunset with her boyfriend, Erik Henry, and the two of them were making their way back to the campsite, where they’d planned to spend the night, when she suddenly tumbled 8 feet down a dark trench after she tried to jump across it.

“I wanted to see if I could do it,” she recalled. “I got close to the edge to see if I could to it. In the process I lost my balance and slipped off the rock into the eight-foot trench that had boulders on the bottom,” she said.

“I landed on one rock and fell to the right, that’s how my ankle broke the way it did, it kind of ripped off,” she added, with a laugh.

And so a romantic evening was quickly turning into a dramatic call for medical help, and while her boyfriend ran down the mountain to try and get some assistance Lexi did what anyone in the remote wilds, in the dark, in severe intense pain would do. She made a video blog.

Is this woman delirious? Her ankle is twisted the wrong way and she’s managing to film it and talk, when most people would’ve fainted and cried till their eyes fell out, but not her.

She trains a camera on the broken appendage and gives a running commentary with some jokes. Bravo. For a moment i thought it might go all a bit Danny Boyle’s ‘127 Hours’ and she hacks her foot off with a nail file.

“I wanted to have something to show for the time I was up there,” De Forest said. “It was kind of coping mechanism to relieve the anxiety that was forming. And in doing so, it calmed me. I was able to be level headed about how scared I was.”

When search and rescue arrived, it took more than five hours to transport De Forest down the mountain, into a helicopter and into the hospital.

She endured two surgeries – metal rods are currently keeping her foot attached to her leg.

SO remember, next time you get a splinter in your thumb and you sit there feeling brave whilst a friend goes to get some tweezers and a band-aid, and you think about videoing it on your smartphone because you are so brave and all that. Don't bother.

Here she is (below) a couple of weeks later recounting the events of that ill-fated mountain-mishap evening.