Angela Hernandez says she was enjoying a picturesque drive from Oregon to Southern California on Highway 1 until a small animal darted onto the roadway, prompting her to swerve and lose control of her Jeep. The next thing she remembered was waking up at the base of a 250-foot Big Sur cliff.

“I was still in my car and I could feel water rising over my knees,” Hernandez, 23, of Oregon, posted Sunday on Facebook as she continues recovering at a hospital in California. “My head hurt and when I touched it, I found blood on my hands. My car’s power was off by now and every window was closed. Everything kind of happens fast here.”

Hernandez, 23, ripped off her seatbelt and grabbed a multi-function tool she kept near her front seat before smashing her driver’s seat window. In an instant, the serenity of a peaceful drive had turned into a life-threatening situation, she said.

“Every bone in my body hurt,” Hernandez wrote of the July 6 crash. “The only thing racing through my mind was my sister, Isabel. So I started screaming her name.”

With her sister nowhere in sight, Hernandez said she instead focused on getting out of her Jeep and ultimately jumped into the Pacific Ocean before swimming to shore and falling asleep. Only when Hernandez awoke did she realize the magnitude of the crash and her newfound nightmarish reality.

“I saw nothing but rocks, the ocean and a cliff that I knew I’d never be able to look over,” she continued. “I could see my car not too far from me, half washed up on shore with the roof ripped off of it. I looked down at my feet and saw that my shoes were gone.”

Hernandez spent the next few days in a “blur,” endlessly walking up and down long stretches of the beach near Kirk Creek Campground in a desperate search for help. She also climbed onto rocks to avoid the “sharp sand” and had to dodge tiny crabs along the way.

“I could see cars driving across the cliff and felt like if I could yell just loud enough, that one could hear or see me,” Hernandez said. “That’s all it would take to make it back to my family. Just one person noticing me.”

About three days later, with Hernandez suffering from dehydration, she ventured back to her Jeep and tore off a 10-inch hose that broke off during the crash. She later used the hose to corral water dripping from moss into her mouth.

“It was fresh!!!” Hernandez recalled. “I collected as much as I could in my little hose and drank from it for maybe an hour.”

The next few days were a monotonous slog for Hernandez, who ritualistically scanned the beach for people and potential places to make her way up the cliff. But no exits presented themselves and Hernandez started getting a little loopy.

“Songs I hadn’t heard in years who play on repeat inside my head,” she wrote. “I’d daydream of foods I’d get to eat once I was found and imagined the face of the person who would eventually find me.”

Hernandez’s apparition soon became a reality in the form of Chelsea Moore, who was walking along the beach off the Big Sur coast with her husband when they spotted a piece of the wrecked SUV.

“We saw a bumper first and we were like, ‘Hmmm, there’s a bumper,’” Moore told KION. “That’s weird. And then came around another bend and saw the car.”

The Moores began picking scattered debris from the car, including its license plate, to turn over to police. They then headed back to their campsite about 1 or 2 miles from the car along the beach and spotted Hernandez.

“We turned around and Angela was right there in the rocks, just looked like hell,” Chad Moore said. “She was happy at the same time, she was really happy to see us.”

The couple gave Hernandez food and blankets until emergency responders arrived. Hernandez would later learn from doctors that she was suffering from a brain hemorrhage during the first few days after the crash. She also had four broken ribs, fractures in both of her collarbones, a collapsed lung, ruptured blood vessels in her eyes and extreme sunburn on her hands, feet and face.

“But, at the end of the day, none of that matters,” Hernandez wrote. “I feel like I have everything I’ve ever wanted. I’m sitting here at the hospital, laughing with my sister until she makes my broken bones hurt … I’ve experienced something so unique and terrifying [that] I can’t imagine that there isn’t a bigger purpose for me in this life. I don’t know, you guys, life is incredible.”