I finally finished this one today! And what a journey it’s been with me over the years.

I first picked this up during a hometown walk in the pandemic in 2020, and returned to it again just a few months ago. What an inspiring, heartfelt, messy, dirty, raw, emotional, self-knowing self-healing personal journey and essay.

Here’s to more reading and finding yourself in the great outdoors, in this digital age.

I loved this. Cheryl’s writing is incredibly engaging, thoughtful, intuitive, self-aware and self-knowing, yet also self-deprecating. She honors herself and her journey and her pain, to decide to hike the Pacific Crest Trail as a young twenty-something woman, all alone, with little experience, and just a curious heart.

As she goes along her journey, I’m taken back by her memories of her mother, her father, her childhood, that seems to answer much of the knowledge she seeks to find within herself. Many times I found myself tearing up, as she speaks to herself reflecting on missing/hating her dead mother, to her strained relationships with men and nonexistent fathers, to all the kind souls she’s met on the trail and being the “Queen of the PCT” she is, as most want to help her than hurt her.

It’s a powerful story and personal essay chronicling womanhood and the search for answers. It’s clear she’s inspired by classic writers and nature, but she doesn’t hide away from the grittiness of herself and the journey itself. It’s messy, dirty, painful, but also enlightening, heartwarmina. and pure. Even hot sex with a stranger after all her years of toying around, is well-deserved, as she comes into a newness and safety within herself.

Her story always stays with me and is a guiding light for times I feel “wild” wanting to be found, searching for answers, meaning, and seeking out the beauty of nature along the Pacific Northwest. Some might be annoyed from her white privilege thinking she can do such a thing, but her bravery and self-knowing humbles you.

She’s just like any of us — annoying and self-absorbed at times, yet searching for something, like we all do at times.

And even when we can’t quite find meaning in the midst of things, she reminds us… “How wild it was, to let it be.”

Read from: Aug 05, 2020 – Mar 14, 2025

With love and honesty,

Rachel