A ‘spiritual boot camp’ Amanda Eller offers new details on surviving 17 days in East Maui forest

WAILUKU — Hiker Amanda Eller said she was about to make clothing out of ferns and start testing new plants to eat when she was rescued from remote forestland on Maui’s northeast side on Friday.

KEHAULANI CERIZO Staff Writer kcerizo@mauinews.com

She said she’d had visions of a rescue earlier that day of her friend and dive instructor Javier Cantellops “rappelling up the waterfall and peeking his little head out and saying, ‘I got you, girl.’ “

New details came to light as Eller spoke publicly for the first time on Tuesday about the 17 days she spent lost in the Makawao Forest Reserve, where she started her hike on May 8 and ended up about five miles makai on a narrow stream bed swallowed by dense vegetation and deep ravines in Kailua.

Eller, flanked by father John, mother Julia, sister Alicia and brother Chris, called her experience a “spiritual boot camp” during a press conference Tuesday at Maui Memorial Medical Center prior to a check-up appointment.

On May 8, Eller said she awoke at the Haiku home she shares with boyfriend Benjamin Konkol, meditated, cleaned a bit and had a smoothie of ashwagandha and protein powder, along with an RXBAR protein bar and some water.

Alicia Eller wheels his sister, Amanda Eller, to a doctor’s appointment at the close of Tuesday’s news conference at Maui Memorial Medical Center.

“I really didn’t have much in my stomach. I didn’t have any caffeine and any sugar. I definitely didn’t have any drugs or alcohol or anything like that,” she said. “Anybody that knows me and knows my spiritual journey in the last few years know that I get high off of life, and off of people and heart. And so, I don’t know. Everybody can have their theories there, I don’t care.”

Eller said she was supposed to meet a friend but didn’t. Instead, she did some errands and went to ground herself in nature on a three-mile hike off “Hunter’s Trail” in the reserve, an area she said that she hadn’t been to before.

“I love to stay away from EMF (electromagnetic fields), cell phones,” said Eller, who left her keys, cell phone and wallet in the car. “My goal was three miles, a couple of hours.”

Eller said she took a break, “laid down on a tree” and tried to go back the way she came.

However, the path didn’t lead back to the car. She said she soon realized the trails were no longer biking or walking paths but boar paths that led her farther away.

Amanda Eller is flanked by her parents, John and Julia, sister Alicia and brother Chris during Tuesday’s press conference.

“I don’t really know what happened,” said Eller, who emphasized that she is still processing the experience. “All I can say is that I got out of my car, it’s like I have a strong sense of internal guidance, whatever you want to call that, a voice, spirit, everyone 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. I’m like, great, this is so strong that obviously when I turn around and go back to my car, it’s gonna be just as strong. But it wasn’t.”

During her more than two-week ordeal, Eller said, she fell 20 feet, which “jammed” her knee and left her “screaming in pain” and hobbling. She fractured her left tibia, according to her doctor at Maui Memorial. Also, her body showed visible welts, cuts and sores from moving through brush.

There were nights she laid in grass and slept. Other times, she slept on rocks or “on the mud, which I wouldn’t recommend ever doing that, it’s very cold and doesn’t warm up.”

Eller said she saw helicopters pass over about 20 times and tried to get rescue attention by “putting SOS on rocks” and placing “any kind of clothing I could take off my body out.”

While she subsisted off guava, berries and plants, which she said she learned to eat from a book by Native Hawaiian plant author David Bruce Leonard, she knew water would be the key to survival. About a week in, she found a stream. Farther down that stream would be her eventual extraction spot.

Healing sores and scrapes are visible on Eller’s arm as she answers a question Tuesday.

Water, though, also carried certain challenges. The night after her 20-foot-fall, there was a flash flood, causing her to worry that she would get swept away, possibly out to sea.

“Spirit’s been like, ‘You’ve been asking for this, we’re just going to strip all of these layers back,’ “ she said. “I felt my wide open heart penetrate every single cell of my being and any kind of dark spots that were in my body, energetically, however you want to think about it, were just lit up and I felt myself starting to glow as I’m shaking in a foot of water, sitting on a rock in the middle of a flash flood. That was a dark but bright moment; that was one for the record books.”

She called the day of her rescue a miracle. Once she realized a helicopter had seen her, “my heart fell through my feet,” she said. “I just collapsed. I had a plant in my mouth that I was planning on eating for dinner.”

The 35-year-old Haiku resident was lost from May 8 to May 24. Eller was reported missing to police on May 9 by boyfriend Konkol, and her car was recovered by officials that day in a reserve parking lot.

An initial ground and air search of the forest by police and fire led to a large-scale volunteer effort that drew an average of 100 searchers a day who canvassed water, land and air, using drones, scent dogs, rappellers, divers, hunters and even psychics. Eller was found on Friday afternoon by Cantellops, lead volunteer searcher Chris Berquist and hunter Troy Helmer aboard a private helicopter supported by GoFundMe donations. (The Eller family has said it wants to use remaining funds to place wildlife cameras in the Makawao Forest and other recreational areas to aid in future searches.) She was then hospitalized and released Sunday.

Amanda Eller describes her commitment to survive as well as the lessons and resources she tapped to keep believing and refusing to give up.

The yoga instructor and physical therapist, who said she considers herself more of a “healer” after this experience, said she had been working over the last six months with a psychic named Ruth and some of “the strongest teachers in the world,” who have helped guide her in a variety of ways.

“Little did I know they were preparing me for what I’m calling spiritual boot camp, which is what I went through,” she said.

Eller said she has a “very strong direction” leading her to a wellness center in the next five years to help “really sick people” get well.

“The bigger picture of this whole scenario is hope and community and aloha and ohana and brotherhood and tribeship,” she said. “I can’t reiterate enough, if I start to see a movement occur in the world, it’s like, whoa, I am so stoked my story could’ve done that.”

When asked about several social media comments criticizing Konkol and family spokeswoman Sarah Haynes, Eller said she doesn’t pay much attention to online chatter. She said despite any negatives, she remains focused on the positive.

“I’m not feeding those wolves,” she said. “I think there are a lot of confused, delusional people in the world that I’d love to help. And I’ve had a few disruptive people come up to me and say some disruptive things. I feel bad for them. I mean, really, underneath of it all, just like the Buddha, it’s like I see their suffering, I see their confusion, and I’m not taking that energy in.”

* Kehaulani Cerizo can be reached at kcerizo@maui news.com.