Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century


At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she would do it alone.

Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

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Published Mar 26, 2013

315 pages

Average rating: 7.61

628 RATINGS

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What Bookclubbers are saying about this book

✨ Summarized by Bookclubs AI

Readers say *Wild* is a powerful, poetic memoir of grief, resilience, and self-discovery through Cheryl Strayed’s daunting 1,100-mile hike on the Paci...

LTC
Nov 20, 2024
Book #13: Kathleen nominated and hosted!
Khris Sellin
Jul 05, 2024
8/10 stars
What can I say about this book that everybody hasn't already said? I don't understand the negativity towards the book or the author. This young woman not only lost her mother, but then her stepfather disappeared -- this after being abandoned long before then by her biological father. She was experiencing grief and trauma, and she was very honest about the shitty way she handled it, and this journey was her way of getting herself clean, of "finding herself." We are all on our own journey. It's reading stories like this that help us understand a different perspective. Or not, apparently.
(Don't even get me started on comparisons to Eat, Pray, Love....)
jeabot
May 30, 2024
6/10 stars
A journey of discovery

Cheryl made the journey of a lifetime. I can't even imagine enduring the pain of an 1100 mile backpacking trip. I loved the descriptions of scenery I will never see. Nd the stories of her encounters with other hikers. The first part of the story is tough to read. The loss of her mother sent her into a spiral that only the trail helped her survive it.
anne ducastel
Jan 08, 2026
6/10 stars
I enjoyed the writing style tremendously, it was a fast and easy read and I appreciated the author's brutal honesty, to the point where at times, I wished she had not just shared that with me...BUT I had difficulties sympathizing with the author, for her lack of maturity and discernement. There is such a distinct disconnect between the writing style and the author's behavior in the book that I even wondered at times if she was writing about a fictional character.
tamcconnell1
Dec 25, 2025
8/10 stars
The perfect book to read prior to and during our travels and hiking on a small portion of the PCT

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