A couple helped rescue a woman after she fell down a snowy hill in the Angeles National Forest.
Aly Pan and her friends Sarah and Yuni planned a last-minute trip since Aly had never seen snow before.
“It was my first time ever seeing snow so I was very excited. We stopped a few times on the road because I was making snowmen and little ducks,” Pan said.
The group was having a fun time, taking photos and making snowmen until things took a bad turn.
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Pan said she and her friend Sarah had gotten off of the car to take some photos while Yuni waited in the car. Pan turned to wave at Yuni, and when he had looked down and back up, she was gone.
“I was looking at the view and I guess I stood a little too close,” Pan said. She had slipped off of the side of a snowy hill, trying to hold onto anything she possibly could.
Pan said she saw something that looked like a wire sticking out of the snow and was able to grab onto it as well as a rock that was wedged in the snow. At the bottom, there were a few rocks and some trees.
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“I probably could have broken something, it was really lucky that random wire thing was there,” Pan said. “I kept looking down and seeing the rocks and I was like ‘Oh man, those look kinda sharp.’”
Pan said she was stuck for about 45 minutes when she noticed the rock she was holding onto had started to wedge out and the snow under her feet started to melt.
“I was like ‘This sucks. It’s my first time seeing snow and I’ve endangered myself,’” Pan said.
She said all she could think about at that moment was her cat and how she would miss him and how she tried to send her mom a photo of her snowman but had no signal. Her friends had tried to call 911 but they had no signal. Sarah had tried to flag down a car but they did not stop.
It wasn’t until Yuni walked out to the middle of the road and flagged down a couple. Beatriz Pano and her husband Pablo González were driving when they spotted Yuni.
“I was recording a video of the view when suddenly this man appeared in the middle of the road, very scared and his whole body was shaking,” Pano said in a TikTok video.
The couple quickly went over to find the Pan, who was lying in the snow, unable to climb back up. Pano and her husband grabbed a thick, yellow rope and threw it down for Pan to hold onto.
Pan’s friends yelled out words of encouragement to her, trying to help her calm down and slowly move up the snow-covered hill. "After all this we're gonna get some hot soup and we're all gonna be fine ok?" Yuni yelled out to Pan.
González and Yuni were able to lift Pan slowly up the hill until she reached the top. Once at the top, the three friends embraced each other, expressing their happiness to see that she was safe.
Pan said she found herself hyperventilating and her fingers felt numb for a few hours. The group of friends went out for some hotpot together after leaving the snow.
“It’s okay, you are safe,” Pano told Pan as she tried to console her.
“Muchas gracias,” Yuni said to Pano as he shook the couple’s hands and hugged them.
In her TikTok video, Pano explains that it is always a good idea to be prepared and carry gear such as a rope that could possibly help save a life.
"I overestimated how soft the snow was and it broke under me. Thank you so much for helping me," Pan wrote in a comment on Beatriz's TikTok video.
Pan made it out safely with only a few cuts and bruises, and six broken nails. She said it might be a long time before she goes out in the snow again.
