Two climbers stranded on a steep cliffside in California's Big Sur were rescued by a California Highway Patrol (CHP) helicopter crew on Saturday, in an operation captured on video. The pair had become trapped roughly 600 feet below the roadway near Hurricane Point, requiring a technically demanding hoist rescue given the difficulty of the terrain.

Big Sur Fire called in CHP's Paso Robles Air Unit at around 6:24pm, after which the H-70 helicopter hovered above the ravine while a rescue technician was lowered by cable. The terrain was too steep for the technician to safely unclip after reaching the first climber, so he secured them together in a Pelican rescue harness and both were lifted to a staging area; the same manoeuvre was then repeated to retrieve the second climber. CHP did not release the climbers' identities or say how they became stranded, but confirmed both survived. The rescue came just over two weeks after the same H-70 crew carried out three other missions in one day, including hoisting an injured teenage hiker, aiding a fall victim at a waterfall, and airlifting a dehydrated hunter to safety.