Timeline: Backpacker's ordeal

Miss Saunders wrote a message to her boyfriend

Worcestershire teenager Louise Saunders spent a terrifying three-days lost in the Australian outback.

BBC News Online chronicles the 19-year-old's ordeal.

26 November: Miss Saunders, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, sets out alone to climb Mount Tyson, a 660 metre peak near the town of Tully in northern Queensland.

She tells her friend Joanne Woodward she will be back in the town by late afternoon and is seen by witnesses walking along a track at the summit of the mountain.

Liz Saunders endured an anxious wait

Later that day, she calls her friend to say she is lost but her phone cuts out. Police are called when she fails to return to the town.

27 November: Police and emergency workers begin a search for Miss Saunders and the Australian authorities contact her mother, Liz, at the family home in Kidderminster, Worcestershire.

Mrs Saunders describes the wait for news as "the longest night" of her life.

28 November: Aboriginal trackers, emergency crews and helicopters with heat-seeking equipment are called in to help in the large-scale search, scouring the dense areas of tropical forest.

Trackers later find a message written by Miss Saunders on a tree in red felt pen. It reads: "Louise S loves Steven W for eva". Evidence is also found of food she has eaten.

Miss Saunders' mother says she will not give up hope her daughter will be found alive.

29 November: Miss Saunders finds her own way out of the rainforest by following a stream to a rubbish tip on the outskirts of Tully. She emerges with minor cuts and bruises.

The search is called off.

At a press conference, she describes her relief and tells journalists: "I thought if I don't get out today, I never will."

Her mother is equally relived and calls her daughter's survival "amazing news".