Aussie hiker with ‘snapped’ leg makes two-day crawl to safety

A bushwalker who tumbled down a waterfall, snapping his leg in two, told yesterday how he managed to crawl for two days though scrub and forest to safety.

Neil Parker, 54, said his planned three-hour hike northwest of Brisbane went horribly wrong on Sunday when he slipped 6m down the waterfall, fracturing his leg and wrist.

“I cartwheeled and slammed into the rock and then landed in the creek at the bottom,” he said from his hospital bed.

The experienced hiker said the entire bottom half of his leg was hanging loose thanks to a “clean snap in half ”.

“Straight away, I thought, ‘I’m now in a lot of trouble because no one knows where I am’.”

He tried to phone for help, but after dropping his mobile “into the drink” he started crawling back to a clearing where he believed he would have a better chance of being rescued.

Efforts to attach a makeshift splint to the badly injured leg were ultimately successful, but caused pain so great he hallucinated, Parker said.

With just a “handful of nuts, a protein bar and some lollies” to sustain him, Parker began the excruciating 3km journey to the clearing.

“What took me 40 minutes to walk up took me nearly two days to crawl back down,” he said.

He saw a search-and-rescue helicopter flying overhead on Sunday night, but knew there was no chance of them finding him as he was “deep under the scrub”.

Parker was eventually spotted by a helicopter and winched out on Tuesday afternoon.

He said knowledge had been instrumental to his survival, but it was the thought of his family that pushed him to keep going during a mentally taxing experience.