Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

by Cheryl Strayed

So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless.

There wasn’t a day on the trail when that monotony didn’t ultimately win out, when the only thing to think about was whatever was the physically hardest. It was a sort of scorching cure. I counted my steps, working my way to a hundred and starting over again at one.

I was in a beautiful place—a place I’d come to love, in spite and because of its hardships—and I’d gotten myself into this place on my own two feet.

It was a woman who first thought of the PCT. She was a retired teacher from

Bellingham, Washington, named Catherine Montgomery. In a conversation with mountaineer and writer Joseph T. Hazard, she suggested that there should be a border-to-border “high trail winding down the heights of our western mountains.” It was 1926. Though a small group of hikers immediately embraced Montgomery’s idea, it wasn’t until Clinton Churchill Clarke took up the cause six years later that a clear vision of the PCT began to coalesce.

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and

meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. That’s what Montgomery knew, I supposed. And what Clarke knew and Rogers and what thousands of people who preceded and followed them knew.

Grief doesn’t have a face.

it was published by the Communist Party of Minnesota and dated October 1920.

Even the dogs were discreetly funked out in bandannas and beads. I

There were so many other amazing things in this world.

was crying because I was full.