BIG SUR, Calif. _ The cold, salty water rose over Angela Hernandez's knees, jolting her back into consciousness. She touched her throbbing head and her hands returned red with blood.
She was awake, but where?
Inside her vehicle, she looked through the windshield at a rising, gray Pacific Ocean. Minutes, maybe hours earlier, the 23-year-old had plummeted 250 feet off a jagged Big Sur cliff, her crumpled white 2011 Jeep Patriot landing wheels down on a rocky shoreline.
"Everything kind of happens fast here," Hernandez recounted in a Facebook post late Sunday night from her hospital bed, sharing unbelievable details of her miraculous survival over seven cold, wet nights alone on that isolated beach _ before her just as miraculous rescue Friday by a married couple searching for a fishing spot.
Her survival story _ told through Facebook posts and interviews with her rescuers Monday _ was embraced on social media and heralded by Monterey County Sheriff Steve Bernal at a news conference Monday: "She wouldn't be with us if she didn't have that fight in her."
Her last memory had been seconds before the crash on July 6. As she drove along the curvy, scenic Highway 1, a small animal darted in front of her SUV and she swerved.
"I don't really remember much of the fall," Hernandez wrote.
When her Jeep finally stopped tumbling and she came to, Hernandez quickly unbuckled her seat belt and noticed the water level rising. She was trapped inside. Not a single window in her SUV broke during the plunge. In the front seat, she found an emergency tool and began slamming it against the driver's side window.
"Isabel!" she screamed over and over as she banged the glass, the thought of her sister helping her summon strength in her broken body _ a brain hemorrhage, four fractured ribs, broken collar bones, collapsed lung, ruptured blood vessels in both eyes.
Finally free from the vehicle, a dazed Hernandez jumped into the ocean and swam to shore. She tucked up against the impossibly high cliff, onto rocks as far away from the encroaching waves as she could.
And blacked out.
