VIDEO: Amanda Eller speaks | News, Sports, Jobs

Former Maui resident Amanda Eller spoke during an exclusive interview with The Maui News about the one-year anniversary of her rescue and more.The Maui News / KEHAULANI CERIZO photo

A lot has changed for Amanda Eller since being rescued from the top of a waterfall in East Maui’s jungle a little over a year ago.

Eller, a former Maui resident who caught the world’s attention when she went hiking at Makawao Forest Reserve only to disappear for 17 days, traveled to India last year. She moved back to the East Coast in November. And now she’s writing a book to process her ordeal and find “some sense of normalcy.”

Other things, such as the doctor of physical therapy’s desire to help heal others and self, remain the same.

“I’m just a human, just like anybody else. And the only difference is that I went through this traumatic experience and I found some tools to help me through,” Eller said Thursday. “So there’s no hierarchy here. . . . Maybe I can help some people through relating.”

Amanda Eller, shown last year, talked recently about the anniversary of her rescue from the East Maui jungle after spending nearly three weeks missing. She is in the process of writing a book on her ordeal and she said it will likely be finished in September. View the entire interview at www.mauinews.com.

Eller recently agreed to the first exclusive interview with Hawaii media after The Maui News published an account from rescuers who found her a year ago. During the interview, she clarified parts of her disappearance that started at the Hunter’s Trail on May 8, 2019, and ended via airlift 5 to 7 miles away near Kailua reservoir on May 24.

Longtime Maui search-and-rescue pilot Pete Vorhes, who navigated his helicopter to find Eller that day, recently shed light on rescue details and agreed that she was indeed missing.

However, Vorhes, along with other residents, said many questions remain over the details leading up to the discovery. Eller’s nearly three-week search generated the largest volunteer effort in recent history, more than $70,000 in donations and a lot of community discussion over topics that ranged from Eller’s state of mind to the reasons she got lost and continued to be lost for as long as she was.

Still, Eller returned to her spiritual side and “inward tools,” attributing her survival to part miracle and part people who would not give up on her.

“I only know what I experienced, what I experienced is like, you know, by an act of something miraculous, I was rescued,” she said Thursday. “After four days, you better believe I was praying to anything I could think of . . . of higher power that could help me because I did not want to be there.”

Healing: A year later

Reflecting on the one-year anniversary of rescue, Eller said the days surrounding the occasion had been difficult. She chose to spend time with family members, who are within driving distance, so they could process the experience together.

“The anniversary itself was really rough, like very emotional. I would call that a traumatic event, you know, something similar to PTSD,” she said. “And so it re-triggered a lot of stuff. It was a process I had to go through, but I made it through and I’m stronger now.”

Portions of Eller’s physical healing are requiring patience as well.

After nearly three weeks missing, Eller had lost significant weight and suffered bad sunburns, an infection from brush-induced scrapes on both shins and a fractured tibial plateau on her left knee from falling in a stream.

Doctors had placed Eller on lots of antibiotics for the infections and on crutches for eight weeks for her knee. A year later, her knee is still not back to normal.

“I’m not able to do all the things I used to be able to do, like run and heavy hiking and things like that,” she said. “My shins are healed up pretty well, which is great because the infection was so bad. I could have lost my legs is what the doctors said when they came in to look at them in the hospital.”

Overall, Eller said she’s grateful to have a healthy body and that focusing on what she can do, instead of what she can’t do, is what helped her keep going in the forest.

Navigating the limelight

Aside from the physical shock of being lost for so long, Eller said it was tough to navigate the emotional shock of being thrust into the limelight immediately after her rescue.

A self-described “super low-key, grounded person” who shied away from marketing for her Maui physical therapy practice, Eller talked about being a “deer in headlights” following her rescue.

Photos were taken by excited rescuers as soon as she was found. An unexpected interview where she felt “out of sorts” was conducted by The New York Times the first night of her stay at Maui Memorial Medical Center. As soon as she was discharged, she had lights and “20 microphones” on her during news conferences with media from around the nation.

At that point, Eller’s nervous system had already reached a peak, she said. And while she can understand the hype, the physical therapist said that she would have been protective of a client if he or she had gone through something similar.

“I’m a healer by nature. . . . If something like that happened to my patients per se, you know, I would take them under my wing and protect them and be like, no, just like back up, give her some space, let her breathe,” she said.

Soon, negative publicity and accusations that Eller was at the center of a hoax started to surface. She maintains that her ordeal was not intentional and she had no desire for the negative or positive attention it drew.

“It just totally blew my mind,” she said. “And it was kind of sad, you know, that people were trying to rip me apart and slander me. And there was even some people creating Instagram accounts . . . and writing things on my pictures about fake and scam and whatever. And to that, I just say it’s really sad, you know? For those people that that’s how they want to spend their time.”

Day One: Then about 16 more

Eller did say she understands the skepticism about her story that came with the media attention.

She talked at length about her time in the woods in an area she hadn’t been before. Eller shed light on the first day missing, what she ate to survive, how she lost her shoes (one of which was later found by Vorhes) and what it was like trudging through tall grass and sleeping in places boars had matted down.

Eller explained Thursday that she did not sleep on a log the day she went missing, which was initially described by a family member in media interviews.

“So I laid on the (downed) tree and close my eyes and I meditated, I never fell asleep,” she said. “Meditating means you just kind of like close your eyes and you get quiet . . . generally speaking.”

When asked about whether she had crossed roads or had seen infrastructure, Eller said on the first day she had seen a road, a mailbox, a sign that said “something about a hunter check-in,” and water reservoirs and water tanks to the right. To the left was a road that said private property.

She thought heading to the right would have led her deeper into the forest. She figured that going left would possibly take her to houses or driveways. She went down that road until it ended, she said.

Eller added that she had a thought to stay put at the reservoir but was concerned about finding safe drinking water.

“I don’t know about drinking that water out of the reservoir, who knows? I could die alone from that. So for whatever reason, I didn’t want to sit there. . . . It didn’t feel like it was the right thing. So I was like, now I’m going to find my way out. I was like, hell bent on it and headed down towards where I thought people would be.”

Eller also reiterated that she did not take anything that could have altered her state of mind.

While she was in the forest, she ate strawberry guavas, thimble berries, plants that she evaluated using the “gut test” and a couple small moths on her last day.

“I could tell that I was withering away,” she said. “I said a prayer and I just, I was like, I need some protein, you know, I need some sustenance, some real food and right then when I opened my eyes a moth landed on my hand. I licked it off. It was so tiny. And then I think that happened again that day.”

Moving ahead

Once the hiker was found alive, celebrations reverberated across the island. In the days that followed, Eller said she wanted to hide away from expectations she felt people had for how she should respond to the incident.

During the interview Thursday, Eller said she is thankful for the roles police, fire and first responders had in her search and rescue, along with the community efforts from volunteers and all the people who were “praying for her.”

She continues to rely on her inner voice, intuition or instincts, as she did out in the woods.

Eller said she realizes that not everyone can relate to spiritual language but the way she was speaking when she was out there is what “got her through” the traumatic time.

Now, she’s in a place where she can use “more grounded language to relay the same message,” she said.

Eller said she’s continuing to process her near-death experience by writing a book, which is part of her own healing. She said the book does not yet have a publisher and it will likely be finished in September. There is no movie in the works, she added.

“I’m looking to finish this book to share the story with whoever cares and and then get on with my life,” she said. “So the book is helping me, the writing of the book is helping me to fully process it. So then I’m like not living this trauma anymore and I can return to some sense of normalcy.”

The book will cover her experience and the things that helped keep her alive, “all of the tools, and it’s more like the inward tools, the mental tools, the emotional tools and even the physical.”

Eller said she is not practicing physical therapy at the moment but she misses her Valley Isle patients and Maui as her former home.

Moving back and restarting her practice isn’t out of the question, she said.

“Maybe down the road.”

The full interview is available on The Maui News website today.

* Kehaulani Cerizo can be reached at kcerizo@mauinews.com

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