A 35-year-old Maui woman missing for 17 days was found alive on Friday, just as hopes were starting to dwindle.

Amanda Eller survived in dense forest, a friend said, by sleeping in a boar’s den, covered in ferns, and eating wild fruit and one occasion two moths.

Eller was reported missing on 9 May by her boyfriend, Ben Konkol, when she did not return home for dinner the previous evening. Thousands of volunteers, police, firefighters and search dogs combed thick forest around the trailhead parking lot where her car was found.

The search also involved free divers, rapellers, cavers, swift water rescue teams, hunters, cadaver dogs, drones, all-terrain vehicles and helicopters.

“We were beginning to lose hope,” Amanda’s father, John Eller, said on Friday evening at Maui Memorial medical center, where his daughter was brought to recuperate. “When I got the call at first I thought they were joking, I almost just couldn’t believe it. The terrain here is unbelievable. In those woods it’s so easy to get disoriented, to get lost.”

Eller told friends and family that after realizing she was lost she tried to get back to her car. That effort took two days.

“After that, she gave up looking for the car and started looking for water,” said Katie York, a childhood friend who flew in from Maryland to join searchers in the vast forest for more than a week and a half.

On the third day, York said, Eller slipped and fell 20ft, breaking her leg and tearing the meniscus in her knee. After that, Eller focused on finding water to drink and food to forage. On day four a flash flood washed away her shoes, leaving her feet bare.

“The cold was what she said was the worst,” said York. “She slept in a boar den and covered herself with ferns and anything she could get her hands on. The main thing she wanted was for the rains to hold off so that she wouldn’t be cold and drinking muddy water.”

In the area of north Maui where Eller was found, nighttime temperatures can drop to into the low 60sF (15C), with humidity into the low 80s and frequent rains. She was wearing only a thin white tank top, a sports bra and a pair of yoga pants. For sustenance, Eller drank water from a stream she was following. For food, she ate wild strawberry guavas and, on Friday, two moths that landed on her.

York said: “She said every morning she’d wake up and say: ‘Today’s the day I’m going to get out of this.’ And every night she’d go to bed upset that it hadn’t happened.”

Eller was spotted by searchers in a helicopter around 3.30pm local time, about seven miles “as the crow flies” from the Makawao Forest Reserve trailhead. Javier Cantellops, a search organizer, said significant elevation changes and a non-linear route meant Eller had travelled “more like 30 miles”.

The Makawao reserve covers more than 2,000 acres but the forest itself continues thousands more acres to the eastern-most part of the island, with little to no development and very few roads or trails. For that reason, searchers decided to check out farther-flung areas. After going to one planned area, the searchers in the helicopter decided to keep flying.

“We were all strapped to the helicopter hanging out the sides saying, ‘Look at this, look at that,’” Cantellops said, “and then all at the same time we saw her face and her arms waving … like bam! It was straight out of a movie.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A waterfall in the area where Amanda Eller was found. Photograph: Javier Cantellops/AFP/Getty Images

Cantellops said he and other searchers landed, then “whacked” their way down to where Eller was spotted. The helicopter was not the first she had seen during the search, according to York.

“She said she heard lots of helicopters and would stand up and wave her arms but none of them saw her,” York said.

Eller’s friends and family said that at the time she was found, she had been following a stream in hope of finding the ocean. But she had become trapped at a point where the ravine dropped off sharply.

According to her father, Eller arrived at hospital “pretty banged up, but mentally in perfect shape”.

John Eller said that the family wanted to use money left over from more than $76,000 raised on gofundme to make Maui trailheads safer for hikers, including providing security cameras to be viewed in case of a disappearance.

Investigators and loved ones had agonized over whether Eller might have been abducted in the parking lot, a question a camera could have helped solve.

“This state is the eighth in the nation when it comes to missing people,” John Eller said. “We’d like to leave this place a little bit better than we found it.”