Amanda Eller thanked each and every one of the volunteers who worked for 17 days to help find her after she went missing while on a hike in a Maui jungle.
‘You guys are the heroes,’ Eller, who is currently recovering in a wheelchair, told her rescuers. ‘I am not the hero, I am just the girl sitting here healing my ankles.’
Eller, 35, had gone missing in the Makawao Forest Reserve on May 8 after she went hiking without her cell phone.
A helicopter spotted her near a waterfal on Friday.
The yoga instructor couldn’t hold back tears as she hugged the people who worked tirelessly to save her life.
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Amanda Eller thanked each and every one of the volunteers who worked for 17 days to help find her after she went missing while on a hike in a Maui jungle
The yoga instructor couldn’t hold back tears as she hugged the people who worked tirelessly to save her life
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‘I am so blessed for every breath I take,’ she told them. ‘I’ve never experienced anything like this, where the community is showing up with so much freakin’ heart and so much passion. These guys were not going to give up on me, thank god!’
Eller’s friend Javier Cantellops was in the helicopter when he spotted her waving up at him near the Kailua reservoir.
Cantellops said the helicopter only had five minutes left of fuel before it had to go back to the heliport when Eller suddenly came into view.
‘That moment will live down in the depths of my soul forever,’ he told the Today show on Tuesday.
‘We’re coming up this waterfall and I look down and she appears out of the woods. It can only be described as magic.’
‘You guys are the heroes,’ Eller, who is currently recovering in a wheelchair, told her rescuers. ‘I am not the hero, I am just the girl sitting here healing my ankles’
Eller took the time to talk to everyone spent more than two weeks searching for her
She happily smiled for photos with her friends as they celebrated her miraculous return
‘After 17 days of pushing and searching and miles and miles and hundreds of man hours and so many people coming out to volunteer…it was absolutely magic. It was the greatest single moment of my life.’
Cantellops also revealed that it was Eller’s boyfriend, Benjamin Konkol, who said they should search the Kailua reservoir early on.
‘I remember thinking, “Dude, that’s far away,”‘ he recalled. ‘Then two, three days went by and I remember going up to Ben and being like, “You know what man, we may need to push out and you may be absolutely right.'”
Cantellops said it was ‘incredible’ to see Eller at her party on Monday night.
‘For one, she looked gorgeous when she was out there,’ he said. ‘She was so incredibly gracious to every single person that came to her, and just showed appreciation and love and listening and taking all the love toward her.’
‘I am so blessed for every breath I take,’ she told them. ‘I’ve never experienced anything like this, where the community is showing up with so much freakin’ heart and so much passion’
Eller’s friend Javier Cantellops (pictured with Sarah Haynes, who helped coordinate the search effort) was in the helicopter when he spotted her waving up at him near the Kailua reservoir
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‘She was incredible out there, she was really poised. It was incredible to see.’
Haynes, animal porn who helped coordinate search efforts for Eller, said she’s ‘spiritually great’ even as she struggles through her recovery.
‘She’s going through a very grueling process on her legs, where they need to the remove the tops of the wounds and it’s very painful, much like a burn victim,’ Haynes said.
‘Physically, she’s gone backwards a little bit. She walked out of the hospital, now she’s in a wheelchair. But it’s all part of the healing process, so she’s still moving forward.’
Eller, who was wearing just a thin top, a sports bra and a pair of yoga pants when she got lost, was found around 4 miles from where she had left her car.
Cantellops said the helicopter only had five minutes left of fuel before it had to go back to the heliport when Eller suddenly came into view. They are pictured here during the rescue
‘That moment will live down in the depths of my soul forever,’ said Cantellops (pictured with Eller while she called her parents after being rescued)
When rescuers found her, Eller was suffering from severe sunburn, a broken leg after falling 20 feet off a cliff and wounds to her feet after losing her shoes and socks during a flash flood.
The yoga instructor managed to survive by sleeping in a boar’s den and eating moths, wild berries, and guava.
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Haynes revealed that Eller had reached her brink when she decided to rest at the waterfall.
‘She had kind of resigned herself to talking to the universe and saying, “Hey look, I really don’t wanna go but if this is my highest purpose for some reason, then I’ll accept it. But I’m really hoping you’ll allow me to have a higher purpose with this story and my situation,”‘ Haynes said.
Eller went missing on May 8 after leaving her phone behind while hiking in the Makawao Forest Reserve trail in Maui. She was found around four miles from where she had left her car
Eller was hoisted out of the forest via the helicopter before being taken to the Maui hospital to be treated. She had severe wounds to her feet after losing her shoes and suffered a broken leg
Helicopter search crews say they made eye contact with Eller after spotting her lying in a stream bed and video from the scene shows they were all lifted to safety
‘And then [the helicopter] flew over. She was only in that area for a day and a half.’
Eller, who is originally from Maryland, works as a physical therapist and yoga instructor. She lives and practices in Haiku
Eller was released from the hospital on Sunday.
Speaking from her hospital bed on Saturday where she continues to recover, Eller said: ‘I wanted to give up. But the only option I had was life or death.’
Eller had intended to go on a short trail walk but went off the path at one point to rest. When she resumed hiking, she had lost her bearings.
‘I wanted to go back the way I’d come, but my gut was leading me another way – and I have a very strong gut instinct,’ Eller said. ‘So, I said, my car is this way and I’m just going to keep going until I reach it.’
She said she kept trying to get back to her car but ended up going deeper into the jungle.
‘I heard this voice that said, “If you want to live, keep going,'” she said. ‘I was getting so skinny that I was really starting to doubt if I could survive.’
Eller, pictured in hospital with her boyfriend Benjamin Konkol, was found suffering from severe sunburn, a broken leg after falling off a cliff and wounds to her feet after losing her shoes
At the time of her disappearance, Eller had gone hiking without her phone and was last seen by her boyfriend Konkol. The couple are pictured above together
