Georgia-based outdoorsman Tiffany Slaton was well-equipped with survival skills after missing for nearly three weeks in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The 28-year-old spoke during a press conference on Friday, May 16, and explained how she survived before a down-to-the-last-minute rescue after originally planning to have a three-day camping trip in Fresno, California. By April 28, Slaton was reported missing by her family members after not being heard from in nine days, according to NBC News.

Problems first arose for the woman when she fell off a cliff early on the expedition, which she embarked on April 20. Unable to return to the main road because of a recent avalanche, Slaton was unconscious for two hours before waking to splint one of her knees and “pop” the other back into place.

After attempting to call 911 five times, she asked her phone for the location of the nearest Starbucks, which was eighteen miles away. But with being a “high level archer,” “traveling dialysis technician” and trained in horticulture, Slaton made the trip and logged daily journal entries to “keep sane.” The woman ran out of most of her food in five days but survived on gathered leeks, boiled snow and tea made from foraged manzanita and pine needles.

“The worst thing you can do in an emergency situation is panic,” Slaton said.

It was at the time of her rescuing that Slaton had outlasted thirteen snowstorms, climbed up to 11,000 feet altitudes and lost ten pounds. But the gift came one day before her 28th birthday, when Slaton was found in the Vermilion Valley Resort cabin, although Slaton thought she had hallucinated the refuge. She was found by the resort owner, Christopher Gutierrez.

“That was the 13th heavy snowstorm I had been in, and it was going to be the last one. If he hadn’t come that day, they would’ve found my body there,” Slaton said.

Gutierrez, who recalled Slaton from the missing person report, was met with a hug from the woman and called the encounter “a pretty surreal moment.”