Heroic mum Michelle Pittman reveals the vow she made to her son Dylan before she kept them both alive for 10 days after they got lost in thick bushland near their home

Stuck in the dense, unforgiving bushland of NSW’s 6920 hectare Mount Royal National Park, there was one promise Michelle Pittman made to her nine-year-old son Dylan that kept them going for 10 days.

“If he didn’t make it, neither of us could make it, and I was going to do everything I could to make sure it didn’t happen,” she said.

‘Dylan was my drive. We just had sheer determination, willpower and so much love.”

A shared decision to take a bush walk in the national park, 83 miles north of Newcastle, over an October long weekend in 2017 quickly led to them losing their way. What looked like a path through a creek turned into clusters of red cedar, gum eucalyptus and shrubs.

“It’s so dense and nothing looks the same even though it’s all scrub,” she said.

“You just knew you would never encounter the same place you had been again. Nothing was ever familiar.”

By day two, Ms. Pittman, now 46, knew they were in trouble.

“The next day we walked all day and realized the bush was really deceptive,” she said.

“It was really scary because a million things were going through my head. I was worried about the heat, the shelter and what would happen if it rained.’

For ten days the pair were left licking nothing but water from the backs of the leaves and on the ninth day a miraculous ‘crystal clear’ puddle formed, when both Mrs Pittman and Dylan suffered from severe dehydration.

Food was also non-existent. Early on, while Mrs. Pittman tried to eat a leaf, she spit it out for fear of choking.

Inspired by bush survival expert Bear Grylls, Ms Pittman also drank her own urine on the fourth day.

“I’m glad I did that because I got my period the next day,” she laughs.

‘Then I lost it. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m already in a difficult situation. Why is this happening?’

She battled another hurdle and used her car keys to create a notebook with her T-shirt before simply giving up.

‘On the third day I didn’t even have any trouble with it anymore. Just do what you have to do, I thought,” she said.

At home, friends and family began circulating photos on social media, with SES, NSW Police and Ambulance and National Parks and Wildlife staff conducting a large-scale ground search.

Although no one knew of her plans, investigators eventually found a “slip of paper” that Mrs. Pittman had left at home with a list of places they visited.

Crucially, at the bottom was Mount Royal National Park, where detectives drove in and found her car.

As a rescue operation raced against time to locate Mrs. Pittman and Dylan, the pair battled the unknown.

She says the nights were the hardest, when the fear, stress and cold seeped into their bones, making their teeth ache from shaking.

They were also only dressed for a warm spring day. Mrs. Pittman wore a T-shirt and capri jeans, which she switched with her son’s shorts to give him more coverage.

‘It was so scary. We heard so many sounds, but we couldn’t see anything. Our bodies ached from shaking,” she said.

‘The nights seemed so long and when it started to get dark it became real that we were lost again.’

On day eight, she woke up to see Dylan “turning purple” due to severe dehydration. At the time, her plan to climb the mountain was to make it easier for the couple to be seen by charter planes; however, water sources were scarce.

‘Because we were awake a lot all night because it was so cold, we were able to try to sleep through the day. I said to Dylan, ‘Let’s lie down and when I woke up he was purple-blue and I just screamed.’

‘I thought that was it, but he jumped when I shouted. That’s when I knew we had to move.’

She changed tactics. Their plan now was to leave the mountain and go ‘low down’ to look for water.

The decision also led to them stumbling upon a road on the eleventh day. Dehydrated, delirious and stumbling ‘like zombies’, it was Dylan who first noticed that their path had turned from dirt and twigs to asphalt and gravel.

“He stopped me because we were holding hands and it took me a few seconds to realize we were gone,” she said.

“We just screamed, hugged each other and cried.

‘I knew it, I kept my promise. At that moment I knew.’

As she passed a hut, she realized they were walking along the road from which they entered the park.

A few dozen steps later they were found by an oncoming police car.

‘They both knew exactly who we were. They stopped and said, ‘We’ve been looking for you,’ and that was it.”

It was also a challenge to acclimatize back to the real world. After eleven days of walking, Mrs. Pittman’s legs gave out as soon as they were rescued. Both she and Dylan were plagued by scratches, cuts and tick bites.

“I remember Dylan asking the nurses why I couldn’t walk, and I’m really glad they jumped in and said, ‘Mommy has been working so hard on her body, and now she just needs her rest,’” she said.

“You don’t know what you’re capable of until that moment and I would have continued as long as necessary.”

In the long term, it would take about 18 months before Ms. Pittman could walk without her legs tingling.

They also became afraid of the dark and had difficulty in loud environments.

‘I didn’t want to go anywhere, ever. “I just didn’t want to be around people,” she said.

‘Those ten days felt like years, and it was as if we hadn’t seen people in a long time.

“When I went out, I hid behind my sunglasses because it was part of my mentoring process. It felt like they were my invisibility cloak.”

The Singleton woman has now written a book, aptly titled Lost, about their ordeal. She says it was a way to cope in the years after the 10-day nightmare.

Surprisingly, the ordeal didn’t completely faze them. However, now they are better prepared.

“We make sure we go to places that are busy, like the Three Sisters in Katoomba,” she said.

‘We make sure we have a backpack with us and that it is packed.

‘From the lessons we learned then, we also know that the first thing we have to do is let someone know where we are going.’

Lost: The True Story of How a Mother and Son’s Weekend Adventure Turned into a Fight for Survival is published by Bermingham Books and is available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats, as well as from select bookstores.