Blaney, who had day-hiked avidly but had not done much more than that, read of Ms. “I couldn’t stay married, have been married and divorced three times.
“She had relationship issues, and I was in the same boat,” Ms. She picked up “Wild” and felt an almost immediate connection to the author. One of these is Linda Blaney, 53, a self-described “very burned out” blackjack dealer at the Wynn Las Vegas and Encore resort. Strayed, needed a change in their lives and believed they might find it on this challenging, sometimes lonely route, seeking the combination of “promise and mystery” that Ms. Since “Wild” has appeared, the trail has beckoned to many women who, like Ms. Strayed completed about half of the entire trail over several months, skipping several sections either by plan or by circumstance.) Uncertain how long she would last or what she would find, she was determined to push ahead. With a volume of Adrienne Rich poems in her leaden pack and the still-fresh bruise of a heroin needle on her leg, she began trudging north alone on the trail, starting on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Ravaged by the loss of her mother four years previous and freshly divorced, she was as adrift as the new surname she had chosen. Strayed hit the trail to lose her problems and find herself. Along the way, backpack-freighted hikers descend nearly to sea level (at the Columbia River) and tramp higher than 13,000 feet (at Forester Pass in the Sierra).Īs a memorable character, the trail is perhaps second only to Cheryl Strayed, 45, the author of the memoir “ Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” which has sold more than a million copies since appearing in March 2012. It winds through stately Oregon forests near Crater Lake National Park and it skirts along the shoulders of volcanoes like Mount Rainier in Washington. It traverses the lonesome high country of Sequoia National Park in California and Yosemite’s magazine-cover Tuolumne Meadows. It crosses the western arm of the Mojave Desert. Starting in desert chaparral near the Mexican border, the route climbs (and climbs some more) along the spine of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges as it pushes relentlessly northward.
But that description does it a disservice, for the Pacific trail is longer, wilder, more punishing and also grander than its East Coast cousin. The Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,650-mile hiking and equestrian trail that reaches from Mexico to Canada, has been called the Appalachian Trail of the West Coast.
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