Woman survives 5 days in mangled truck after plummeting 250 feet into canyon

A woman spent four nights trapped in a car wreck after she drove into a canyon in an attempt to avoid hitting a deer.

The unnamed driver was traveling near Mount Baldy, California, on a winding road outside Los Angeles. She swerved to avoid hitting a deer and fell 250 feet onto the embankment, leaving her pickup truck crushed in a field of brush.

The woman reportedly broke her ankle, CNN reported, and survived freezing temperatures by using blankets and supplies in her car. She also reportedly set up bowls in her truck to catch rainwater.

The driver was allegedly trapped in a standing position, with her head partially out the window. However, due to her injuries she was unable to escape on her own.

A fisherman discovered the woman on the fifth day as he was walking along a trail and heard her faint cries for help.

"I don’t know how she survived it," Chris Ayres told a CNN affiliate. "I saw the steering wheel, was almost folded like a taco. Her head must have hit that," he added.

Ayres did not have any cell phone service, so he walked to the road to seek help. He tried to flag down an ambulance, but it didn't stop. A forest service truck later stopped.

The San Dimas Mountain Rescue Team eventually came to the woman's aid and said the truck "couldn't be seen from the road." Ayres' "quest for new fishing waters ultimately saved her life," the San Dimas Mountain Rescue Team wrote on Facebook.

First responders noted that if it were not for her blankets, the woman might not have survived.

"Probably helped her out a lot because it was very cold up there," Captain Ian Thrall from L.A. County Fire told ABC7. "Might be completely different circumstances if she didn't have anything to keep her warm at night."

The county's Fire Air Operations team transported the woman to hospital.

Ayres chalked the rescue up to divine intervention and said "It’s got to be God-led, I happened to stop in that one spot."

"It’s almost like fate," he said.

A few days earlier, a man similarly survived six days in a crushed car beneath a bridge in Indiana. Unable to capture water in a container, the man filtered rainwater through his shirt as it fell down from a drainpipe. He was rescued when two men came across him while out for a walk on their way to a local Bass Pro Shop.

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