How Wild Taught Me That Strength Is a Choice

I didn’t know women could do this. Hell, I didn’t know people could do this.

When I first picked up Wild by Cheryl Strayed, I had no real concept of long-distance hiking. I thought of nature as something you visited for a few hours, maybe a weekend if you were adventurous. The idea of walking for months through the wilderness, alone, carrying everything you needed on your back? That was the stuff of movies or, at best, something rugged men did in the 1800s. But here was this woman—Cheryl—who had never even gone on a hike before deciding to walk over 1,100 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, alone. I was both horrified and fascinated.

The book opens with an image so visceral it’s impossible to forget: Cheryl, standing barefoot on a mountain, watching one of her hiking boots tumble off a cliff. The only pair she had. She lets out a guttural, primal scream before making the only logical decision left—she throws the other boot off the cliff too. It’s a perfect metaphor for everything that follows.

Cheryl was 26 when she embarked on the PCT, utterly unprepared. She had no real hiking experience. She had never hoisted a fully loaded backpack onto her back before she actually stepped onto the trail. And that backpack? She nicknamed it Monster because it was so heavy she could barely lift it. In one particularly funny and painfully relatable moment, she describes packing it with everything she thought she might need—down to an ice ax she didn’t know how to use—and then realizing, too late, that she couldn’t even stand up with it on. “It was exactly like carrying a Volkswagen Beetle,” she writes.

But this book is about more than a hike. It’s about grief and how, when it consumes you, the only way out is through. Cheryl’s mother had died suddenly of cancer at 45, shattering her. In the aftermath, she destroyed her marriage, spiraled into heroin use, and made choices she couldn’t take back. She was utterly lost. The PCT was an act of desperation, a way to save herself when she had no idea how to be saved.

As someone who had spent most of my life thinking about adventure but rarely acting on it, Wild hit me like a gut punch. I had spent years watching others live the lives I secretly wanted—people who hiked mountains, camped under the stars, and carried only what they needed on their backs. I had told myself all the reasons I couldn’t do it: I wasn’t strong enough, I didn’t know where to start, I wasn’t that kind of person. Then came Cheryl, who was also not that kind of person, who made every mistake possible, and yet—she did it anyway.

The PCT breaks her down physically and mentally. She loses toenails. Her feet swell so much that she has to cut the toes off her shoes. She hikes through blistering heat, through snow, past rattlesnakes and bears. There’s a moment where she meets a group of seasoned male hikers who look at her like she’s an alien. “You’re doing this alone?” one of them asks. She realizes then how rare she is.

She also encounters real fear—strange men on the trail, moments where she is painfully aware of her vulnerability. There’s a scene where two hunters come across her and one of them makes a crude comment about her being “all alone out here.” The other, perhaps sensing the shift in energy, tells his friend they should leave. When they finally do, Cheryl is shaken. It’s the terrifying reality of being a woman alone in the wilderness, and yet she chooses to keep going.

Through all of it, what struck me most was the transformation. Cheryl doesn’t finish the PCT as some all-knowing, enlightened guru. She doesn’t even finish the full trail. But she emerges from it a different person—someone who has learned that she is capable of enduring, of surviving, of choosing strength over and over again.

After I finished Wild, I couldn’t shake it. It planted something in me—a restless hunger. I had never considered that I could be that kind of person. A few months later, I signed up for my first trek. I remember standing at the base of the mountain, my own version of Monster on my back, doubting every decision that had led me there. But I kept walking. And walking. And something changed.

If you’ve ever felt lost, if you’ve ever thought you weren’t strong enough, if you’ve ever believed adventure belonged to someone else—this book is for you. Cheryl Strayed didn’t just walk the PCT. She showed us what it means to break apart and build yourself back up again, one step at a time.