Amanda Eller: Seventeen Days Lost in a Maui Forest

On 8 May 2019, Amanda Eller went into Makawao Forest Reserve on the Hawaiian island of Maui for a run and a chance to spend time outdoors. The 35-year-old physical therapist and yoga instructor had reason to expect an ordinary outing. Instead, a wrong turn led her away from the familiar trails, into forest and ravines that proved far harder to retrace than they looked on the way in.

Her white Toyota RAV4 was subsequently found in the reserve parking area. Eller had left her phone behind. When she did not return, concern turned into a search involving police, firefighters, family, friends and volunteers. Authorities initially covered the obvious routes; the landscape was much larger and less forgiving than the neat lines of a trail map suggested.

Why was the route so difficult to recover? Makawao Forest Reserve has a network of tracks used by walkers and riders, with vegetation and stream cuts beyond them. Eller later said she had mistaken animal trails for routes back to her car. The distinction is easy to miss when a walker has already lost their bearings. It explains why simply continuing forward did not solve the problem. The terrain and her increasing distance from the trailhead mattered more than her familiarity with the first few metres of the outing.

Eller later described stopping to meditate before attempting to walk back. She found that the paths she tried did not lead to the car. In a May 2019 interview, she explained that what looked like paths were sometimes tracks made by wild pigs. Having a clear destination in mind is little help if every promising fork leads further away from it.

The car in the parking area became a crucial fixed point for searchers. Local reports said it was a white Toyota RAV4, while the absence of its owner prompted a widening search. A parked vehicle tells rescuers where someone started; it does not tell them which track the person followed, whether they turned back or how far they walked after becoming disoriented. That uncertainty made the forest, nearby gulches and watercourses part of the search area rather than a single marked loop. The lesson is practical, but it should not be simplified into blaming the person who got lost.

Over the following days she moved through difficult terrain, sustaining injuries including a fractured left tibia after a fall. She found water in a stream and survived on plants and wild fruit, according to accounts she gave after her rescue. Those details matter because the ordeal was not a story of living comfortably off the land. It was a prolonged and dangerous period of uncertainty, injury and exposure.

As the rescue effort stretched into a second week, volunteers made a major contribution. Maui News reported search parties using dogs, drones and teams familiar with the area, as well as people prepared to look beyond the regular visitor trails. A lost hiker can be close enough to hear an aircraft yet hidden from view by the canopy. One unsuccessful flight therefore proves very little. Search work was slow, physically demanding and dependent on a willingness to examine places that looked improbable from a map.

The weather and the topography added to the danger. Eller recounted sleeping on mud and rocks and dealing with a sudden rise in the water after a fall. A stream offered drinking water but was no substitute for a safe route out. From the air, the landscape was a mixture of steep green slopes, stream beds and waterfalls, with few obvious clues about where one missing person might be.

After her rescue, Eller described both hope and fear. She recounted seeing helicopters pass without being able to attract attention, and trying to make her position visible with what she had. The forests above East Maui contain steep valleys and streams, and the challenge was not simply finding something to eat. Movement itself carried risks, particularly with an injured leg and limited equipment. Contemporary medical accounts documented a fracture and wounds; there is no need to embellish them with invented diagnoses or a dramatic account of every individual night.

As the days passed, a substantial volunteer search continued. Local reporting described teams working on foot and from the air, using a mix of local knowledge, dog teams and aerial searches. Searchers Javier Cantellops, Chris Berquist and Troy Helmer were aboard a privately hired helicopter on Friday 24 May when they spotted Eller in a deep gulch near the Kailua reservoir, above the Twin Falls area.

Food and water became separate problems. The May 2019 interviews record Eller eating wild plants and fruit, including guava, and drinking from a stream. That survival experience is not a menu for other travellers. Wild plants can be misidentified and untreated natural water is not reliably safe. The relevant point is that she found enough to endure while an extensive search continued. What she consumed, exactly when, is known only to the extent that she described it publicly, so the narrative does not pretend there was a complete day-by-day record.

The sighting came after she had been missing since 8 May. Rescuers described recognising her from the helicopter and making contact while she was in a steep creek bed. Maui Fire Department personnel then assisted with her extraction. The distinction matters: volunteer searchers located Eller, while emergency responders carried out the difficult evacuation from the ravine.

The team in the private helicopter included Javier Cantellops, Chris Berquist and Troy Helmer. On 24 May, they were looking beyond the ground already searched when Berquist and Cantellops recognised Eller near a creek bed. Reporting from Maui described steep sides and difficult access. The helicopter carried the volunteer searchers who found her, but a separate emergency operation was required to get her out. The Maui Fire Department brought rescue personnel to the location and transported her for medical care. Both roles deserve recognition; conflating discovery and evacuation would short-change the people involved.

By the time she was taken to Maui Memorial Medical Center, Eller had been gone for 17 days when counting both the day she disappeared and the day she was found. Some contemporary news reports described 16 days elapsed, a difference in counting rather than evidence of a second incident. She was alive and conscious, but she needed medical care. Her doctors reported injuries and the need for recovery.

Contemporary accounts are unusually specific about this moment because rescuers spoke to local reporters soon afterwards. The searchers described spotting Eller from the air, making eye contact and then descending towards the ravine. Eller herself later spoke about realising that the helicopter had seen her. Those two perspectives, the searchers' and hers, are enough to convey the relief without manufacturing dialogue. Her precise thoughts throughout the ordeal are not independently documented, and the article does not put words in her mouth.

At a public appearance later that month, Eller described the experience as profoundly difficult and spoke of the moment she realised the aircraft had seen her. Contemporary accounts from Maui News and Maui Now document the rescue, her testimony and the people who kept looking. They do not establish the elaborate private biography, later marriage or invented conversations that appeared in an earlier version of this story, so those claims are not repeated here.

Her family and the organisers had kept public attention on the search, and news of the discovery brought an emotional response at the base camp. The story was widely reported because it combined a long absence, remote terrain and an outcome that those waiting had hoped for. Eller received treatment at Maui Memorial Medical Center and later spoke publicly about the ordeal. Press reports described physical injuries and recovery ahead rather than an instant return to normal life. A rescue can end a search without ending the consequences for the person rescued.

The enduring part of the story is not a mythical secret for surviving in a Hawaiian forest. It is the combination of a wrong turn, an unforgiving landscape, a person who kept trying to endure and a volunteer search effort that refused to stop. Travellers taking even short walks should tell someone their route, carry a charged phone and water, and follow official trail information. Maui's green hills are beautiful. They are not obliged to make rescue easy.

Different publications describe the length of the ordeal slightly differently. Eller went missing on 8 May and was located on 24 May 2019. Count both calendar dates and the interval covers 17 days; count only the complete elapsed days between them and the number is 16. That is why a source might report a 16-day search while another calls it 17 days lost. Neither wording is evidence of a separate event, let alone the story of a couple stranded on a distant Hawaiian beach. The original TripMag headline confused an entirely different narrative.

Good rescue stories have an obvious temptation: to reconstruct every meal, injury and conversation as if a reporter were present. That approach would be misleading here. The contemporaneous record supports the disappearance, the volunteer search, the helicopter sighting, her medical treatment and parts of her later account. It does not establish the former article's supposed post-rescue marriage ceremony or a detailed private rehabilitation chronology. Removing those claims changes the texture of the prose, but gives readers something more valuable: a story whose principal facts can actually be checked.

Sources for this account: Maui News, 24 May 2019, 'Searchers at Makawao base camp react after Amanda Eller found alive' (https://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2019/05/amanda-eller-found-alive/); Maui Now, 24 May 2019, 'Amanda Eller: Found in Forest Alive' (https://mauinow.com/2019/05/24/amanda-eller-possibly-found-in-forest-alive/); Maui News, 28 May 2019, 'A spiritual boot camp' (https://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2019/05/a-spiritual-boot-camp/); CBS News, 28 May 2019, 'Hawaii hiker details how she survived 17 days in the jungle' (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amanda-eller-hawaii-maui-hiker-details-how-she-survived-17-days-in-jungle-today-2019-05-28/).