Wild

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is Cheryl Strayed's 2012 memoir of the eleven-hundred-mile solo hike she undertook in the summer of 1995, at twenty-six, four years after her mother's sudden death from cancer at forty-five. In the years between those two events Strayed had drifted into heroin use, lost a brief marriage to a man she still loved, and reached, by her own clear account, the lowest point of her life. On a whim in a Minneapolis outdoor-equipment store she picked up a guidebook to the Pacific Crest Trail, the long-distance route that runs along the spine of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges from the Mojave Desert to the Canadian border. Months later she was setting out alone with a pack she could not lift, in boots that did not fit. The book moves between her trail journal, in scenes of bears, blistered feet, and the strangers she met at trailhead campsites, and the longer interior story of who she was when she left and who she became by the time she crossed the Bridge of the Gods.