Man crawls for two days with broken leg after falling down waterfall

A hiker crawled for two days in search of rescue after plummeting six metres down a waterfall and breaking his leg and wrist.

Neil Parker was walking alone on Mount Nebo in Brisbane, Australia when he fell.

The 54-year old is an experienced hiker but realised his phone had been damaged in the accident when he tried to call for help.

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

“I caught myself the first time as I started to slide, but I had too much momentum and over I went,” he told ABC.

“I was climbing up, so I started looking down and I started sliding down the face of the rock. And I slid about 20 feet, cartwheeled and slammed into the rock and then landed in the creek on the bottom.”

The hiker decided to crawl to an area three kilometres away, where he believed search teams would be better able to find him.

“I could only get a metre or a metre-and-a-half each time before I had to stop,” he said.

The 54-year-old had packed painkillers and protein bars, which he said helped him survive the journey.

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

A rescue helicopter eventually spotted Mr Parker in the scrubland on Tuesday afternoon.

He was winched to safety shortly afterwards and taken to hospital.

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Additional reporting by agencies