RENO, Nev. (NewsNation Now) — Authorities are calling it nothing short of a miracle. A 64-year-old woman was found clinging to a tree on a steep slope in Nevada nearly 12 hours after she was reported missing.

The victim’s son’s friend found her dangling hundreds of feet off the ground before she was pulled to safety.

“He decided just to go look down this hill for no real reason, call out and heard her say ‘help’,'” Seth Williams, a battalion chief with the Reno Fire Department, said Wednesday on NewsNation Prime. “And that was the last word she said. She was completely effectively catatonic after that.”

Williams helped with the rescue, along with about 20 firefighters and paramedics.

“She was in pretty bad shape,” Williams said. “The bystanders had given her a bunch of blankets but she almost completely stopped shivering, which is a bad sign in terms of hypothermia.”

Williams said she also suffered injuries to her legs and lost a shoe.

“She’d been fighting back for a while.” Williams said.

He said the area was so steep that one of the firefighters fell and broke his thumb.

“Where she was hiking was a relatively common hiking area,” Williams said. “Although where she was found was a very unusual area, very steep, you know, something you might consider similar to a double diamond ski run.”

The low angle rope rescue took slightly more than 30 minutes, with responders dragging the victim up the slope in a basket.

Williams said she made a full recovery and has been released from a hospital.

“For firefighters, we go on way too many recoveries,” Williams said. “So (it’s great) to have a successful thing where you get to rescue somebody who is in bad shape, get them quickly to the ambulance, get them warmed up.”

His advice to others going out into the wilderness: Always take your cellphone with you.

“It’s a huge asset for emergency responders,” Williams said. “We can triangulate off the phone and even get specific coordinates.”