Res Ipsa Loquitur

Her red Chevrolet Prism was airborne for 200 feet before nosing into the ground, according to Clemence’s accident report.

The car bounced and went into the air again. At 15 feet off the ground, the car hit a tree. It then rolled several times and landed on the driver’s side about 1,000 feet from the road, shrouded by a thick tree canopy. "There wouldn’t have been any way to tell where she went off the road because there weren’t any skid marks," Clemence said. "The only way anyone would have spotted her was in the fall or winter from an aircraft."

Honeycutt managed to unlatch her seat belt and push aside the airbag. She pressed out what remained of the broken windshield, scratching her arms in the process. Her foot was pinned between the brake pedal and gas pedal, but she got it loose and crawled out, her husband said. "She tried to stand up, but [her leg] kept giving way," he said.

She looked for her cell phone but couldn’t find it. A cell phone wouldn’t have worked in the area anyway, Clemence said. "She was deep in the hole there," he said.

Honeycutt had no choice but to begin the long climb up the hill on her back, using her hands to lift her body and her good leg to push herself a little bit at a time.

Every time her mangled leg was jostled, the pain was excruciating. "She had to stop, catch her breath and do it again," Joe Honeycutt said.

At one point, she fashioned a splint out of sticks, using her bra to hold it together. She told her husband that didn’t work very well because it kept getting caught in the undergrowth.

Later, she found a 3-foot stick and used it to hoist herself up and get oriented.

Sometimes her progress up the hill was blocked by brush and brambles. She could continue only after clearing a path, using her hands to tear apart the undergrowth above her head.

Her husband said the hill got steeper near the edge of the road. "Most of it, you can’t climb without getting hold of brush to help you," he said.

As the day wore on, her thoughts turned to the approaching cold and dark.

The mother of three told her husband she was thinking, "I’m really not scared to die, but I don’t want to get eaten by coyotes."

Eventually, she could hear cars.

She wrested herself up the last and steepest few feet of the hill and lay on the road’s shoulder. A car approached. "She was almost sure [the driver] had seen her because the car slowed down," Joe Honeycutt said. But the car kept going.

So she inched across the shoulder, putting her body on the edge of the road.