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It had been 17 days since anyone had seen Amanda Eller. Her car was spotted near a trailhead in a vast forest reserve in Hawaii, and thousands of search volunteers were scouring the jungles and streams nearby. On Friday afternoon, less than an hour after her family announced a $50,000 reward for information, rescuers found Ms. Eller with a broken leg, sunburns and scrapes, and a torn meniscus in her knee. She was malnourished and dirty. But alive [...]

Temperatures in the area can dip down to the low 60s, with high humidity, cool mist and frequent rain. Ms. Eller had been wearing a thin tank top and capri-length yoga pants. She had left her water bottle, cellphone and wallet in her car, leading many to believe that she had been abducted, or worse. But Ms. Eller said she had not taken those things because she had planned to be gone only a short time.

On the third day, as police officers and firefighters began to search for her, Ms. Eller abandoned hopes of finding the trailhead and started looking for water instead. Things only got worse. She fell 20 feet off a steep cliff, fracturing her leg and tearing the meniscus in her knee, according to her friend Katie York. The next day, she lost her shoes in a flash flood. She moved much more slowly after that. “The whole time I was going deeper into the jungle, even though I thought I was going back where I came from,” Ms. Eller said.

At night Ms. Eller covered herself in ferns, leaves and whatever else she could find on the ground. Some nights she slept in the mud. She spent one night in the den of a wild boar. She ate whatever she could salvage, including wild strawberry guavas, plants she could not identify and moths that landed on her body [...]

Meanwhile, an army of volunteers turned seemingly every stone looking for her. They rappelled into ravines, searched caves, free-dove into pools and navigated fast-moving streams looking for Ms. Eller. Others killed aggressive wild boars and checked their intestines for human remains. At least one volunteer was attacked by a boar. On Day 17, Ms. Eller was near a stream searching for “some plant to eat for dinner and some place to sleep that wasn’t directly in the mud” when she saw a helicopter. She said she had seen and heard multiple helicopters fly above her during her ordeal, according to her friend Ms. York, but none had spotted her. This one did.

She went off the path at one point to rest

In somm trouble,” Ms. Largay wrote in a text message to her husband. “Got off trail to go to br. Now lost.”

As she started her journey into the forest that day, Eller recalled, she said a “voice” guided her through the woods, taking her deeper into the reserve. “I don’t really know what happened,” she said. “All I can say is that I got out of my car, it’s like, you know, I have a strong sense of internal guidance, whatever you want to call that, a voice, spirit — everybody has a different name for it, heart.” “My heart was telling me, ‘Walk down this path, go left,’ Great. ‘Go right.’ It was so strong,” she continued. “I’m like, great, this is so strong that obviously when I turn around and go back to my car it will be just as strong when I go back, but it wasn’t.”

At one point, Eller said she was able to keep warm by seeking shelter inside the den of a wild boar. “This is the Chinese New Year, this is the year of the boar, I’m a boar,” she explained to reporters. “So I’m like finding myself sleeping in a boar’s home. And they were like trailblazing for me.”

JimZipCode wrote: ↑Fri May 31, 2019 6:17 pm






Would.

As she started her journey into the forest that day, Eller recalled, she said a “voice” guided her through the woods, taking her deeper into the reserve.