Claire Nelson always loved the desert.
When the New Zealander’s friends asked her to cat sit at their home near the Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California, she jumped at the chance.
Early one morning she drove into the desert to embark on a six-hour solo hike.
Just hours later, Claire would record a final message for her family.
Claire shares her incredible story with Sunday Night…
Now the 35-year-old has told her incredible story of survival to Sunday Night.
“I started making the videos as soon as I fell. I wanted to record a message to my family so if I ended up dead they would know what happened,” she explained.
Claire had followed the track for over two miles (3.2 kilometres) before realising that she couldn’t find the three mile marker.
Confused and needing a rest, Claire decided to sit on one of the giant boulders in the park.
When she stood up to leave, she slipped and fell down the rocks into the stony canyon below.
“It was when I stood up to get down from the rock, I was quite high up, and it was so slippery that I immediately went down,” she told the BBC earlier this year.
“I knew there was nothing I could do to stop myself. It was like going in slow motion. My head was just going: No, no, no, no.”
She had shattered her pelvis and was unable to move. Claire tried to call emergency services, only to discover there was no signal on her phone.
That’s when Claire decided to record her whole ordeal.
“I can’t move… shattered pelvis,” she said in one of the videos. “I might die here and I’m really scared.”
She used a stick and a plastic bag to create a barrier from the hot desert sun. When her drinking water ran out the next day, Claire was forced to drink her own urine to survive.
But then her phone died.
“I think that’s when I realised that this could be it,” she told Sunday Night.
Claire spent three nights and four days alone in the desert, waiting to die. Just when she thought all hope was lost, she heard a helicopter.
At first, Claire thought she was hallucinating. Then she made a makeshift scarecrow out from her hiking stick and the plastic bag and waved down her rescuers.
“And then I hear them say, ‘We see you. We’re gonna come and get you.’ And I dropped the stick and I just covered my face, and I was too dehydrated to cry, but I sobbed, like dry sobbing. And it was just the relief was just incredible. And I… I was thinking, ‘I’m gonna be OK’,” Claire explained.
Since the accident, Claire has been learning to walk again.
“I’ve always been aware of mortality and that life is short and all that. At any given moment, you know, it could all be taken away from you. I wasn’t ready to die. You know, there’s something to be said about, you know, a will to live. You know, it’s a really strong motivator. It’s a very powerful force,” she said.
“And I underestimated that until that was all I had. I didn’t want that to be where my story ended.”