As she hiked down from Cucamonga Peak in California’s San Gabriel Mountains on Christmas Eve, Ruth Woroniecki noticed the trail was starting to get slippery, ice coating the path she needed to take.

“Okay, you need to concentrate,” she thought to herself.

Woroniecki, 40, zipped her headphones into her backpack and pulled out her hiking sticks to help with the rest of the trek. But that’s where her memory goes blank.

The next thing she remembers is lying with her back against the ice, pain shooting from her head down her entire body, and seeing four hikers huddled around her. One of them held a satellite phone that he’d used to call for help.

Woroniecki didn’t know if she’d be able to stand, whether she’d broken any bones or how long it would take for a rescue team to find her. Struggling to process what had happened, Woroniecki recalled repeatedly thanking the hikers who’d stopped as they waited hours for help.

When the rescue team arrived, she had no choice but to hike the roughly 60 yards around the mountain to a clearing where the helicopter’s cable could safely lift her out. She later learned that she’d walked to safety with a broken neck — and she needed 40 stitches to close the cut on her head.

In the days that followed her fall, news stories about the incident began appearing online. Woroniecki sent written statements to reporters as her vocal cords healed from the trauma.

Now, nearly two months later, she’s reflecting on it all — the fall, the rescue and the ongoing recovery.

“All of a sudden you’re going one way, and now your life’s turned upside down by just seconds,” Woroniecki told The Washington Post. “It’s crazy.”

Woroniecki has been hiking for most of her life.

Growing up just outside Denver, she and her sister, Sarah, especially loved visiting Estes Park, the base camp for Rocky Mountain National Park. They would set up a tent between aspen trees, start a campfire and watch the stars at night.

“We were raised being able to go camping and hiking and just explore all the glory of God’s creation,” Sarah Woroniecki, 42, said.

So when Ruth left the campground where the family had been staying around 5 a.m. on Christmas Eve to hike up to Cucamonga Peak, it wasn’t a surprise. Sarah knew she would make it back in time to watch the Dallas Cowboys game with their family that afternoon.

On the hike up to the peak, Ruth texted a few pictures to her mom and sister of the view from the trail. She was making good time.

But by the time she got to the top, the wind had picked up. She sat at the summit for about 20 minutes before starting the hike back down.

It was then that she slipped on the ice and fell 200 feet, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, which received the emergency response dispatch. A fallen tree trunk broke her fall.

When she came to, Woroniecki could feel a gash circling her head and blood spilling from the cut onto the snow.

“Is it bad?” she asked the four hikers around her, who’d stopped on the trail to help.

“It’s really bad,” one of them answered. “It’s down to the bone.”

As they waited for rescuers, one of the hikers put a ski cap on Woroniecki, who started scooping snow atop it in an attempt to numb the searing pain. She repeated a prayer over and over in her mind: “Jesus, help me. Be with me. Protect me.”

The winds were still heavy when a member of the helicopter crew rappelled down to find her. The only way the helicopter cable could be dropped to them, he told her, was if they moved to an area away from trees.

Woroniecki knew she didn’t have another option. She slowly stood up, and, with the rescuer in front of her and one of the other hikers behind her, walked the couple hundred feet to meet the helicopter cable — all while holding her neck still with both hands.

“I kept holding I think because [of] the adrenaline,” Woroniecki said. “And there was so much going on to move, to walk, to get to the helicopter that my mind was just focused on survival mode, like we’ve got to get out of here.”

Back at the camp, Sarah Woroniecki had started to worry.

Her sister was supposed to have gotten back hours earlier. It wasn’t until Ruth was in the helicopter that she had a signal on her phone and texted her family.

As soon as the text came in on Sarah’s phone, she and her family piled into their van as she tracked Ruth’s location using the Find My Friends feature.

The entire ride there, Sarah kept saying: “Jesus, please help her. Please be with her,” she recalled.

“I’m just imagining the worst, and I’m just praying and praying and praying,” she said. “Because I have no idea if she’s going to be conscious, how close she is to death.”

Her gash was stitched, she was fitted with a neck brace and, on Dec. 27, she had spinal surgery to repair the two vertebrae she’d fractured in her neck.

After the procedure, Woroniecki’s nurses checked on her every few hours.

“Can you move your hands?” they would ask. “Can you move your feet?”

For three days, she couldn’t move anything.

But on Dec. 30, she lifted herself off the bed — and, with the help of her nurses, took her first steps since the fall.

“It was definitely deeply grateful, deeply full of joy,” Woroniecki said.

She’ll have to wear the neck brace for about five more weeks, being careful about not moving it too much. Feeling still hasn’t returned to the left side of her head, which now bears a scar from her stitches.

But on Tuesday, in her most recent follow-up appointment, Woroniecki learned that the alignment in her spine is looking right. It was a relief, she said, to hear good news as her healing continues.

She doesn’t know when she’ll hike again. But she does know she wants to share her story, hoping others are inspired by the strong faith and kindness of others that helped her along the way.

“You just reevaluate everything and what matters in life — the moments, the times,” she said.