A 56-year-old woman from Yokohama in Japan has been rescued eight days after being swept away by a river during a mountain hiking trip.
A fisherman spotted the hiker on the morning eight days after she vanished, sitting on a forest road roughly 3.3 kilometres north-east of the Naramata Dam in Minakami town. Responding police officers arrived at the location to give medical assistance and transport her to safety.
The woman had been reported missing on 9 August while trekking along the riverbed of the Naramata River alongside three men. Police said she slipped, fell into the water, and was carried downstream by the current, according to reporting by Japanese newspaper The Japan News.
Survival in the wilderness
Despite suffering serious injuries, including a fracture to the heel bone in her right foot, the woman managed to climb out of the water. The calcaneus, or heel bone, supports body weight during movement, making navigation across rough terrain difficult. She survived alone in the mountain forest for more than a week by consuming food supplies she had brought with her on the hike.
Doctors are monitoring the woman in hospital, where medical staff assess her condition as stable. Local police reported that officers are continuing to investigate the full circumstances of the accident.
Mountain trekking hazards
Minakami is a mountainous municipality located in Gunma Prefecture in central Japan, roughly 100 miles north-west of Tokyo. The area is known for rugged valleys and mountain streams around the Naramata Dam, a rockfill embankment dam situated along the upper tributaries of the Naramata River.
Yokohama, where the hiker resides, is Japan's second-largest city and the capital of Kanagawa Prefecture, located south of Tokyo along Tokyo Bay.
The incident follows another recent survival story in which 39-year-old American sailor Kai Sato spent over a month adrift alone in the ocean on a yacht. Sato survived by eating oatmeal he had brought on board, along with fish and squid he caught while drifting.
