Wild: Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

Oregon feels like a “hopscotch” in Cheryl’s mind—she can see all of her stops clearly, and her pace has become so steady that the fact that she still has 334 miles to traverse seems like a doable thing rather than a daunting task. As she walks through Oregon, even as the weather yo-yos from cold to hot back to cold, she eats fresh berries and takes in the scenery. Her feet stop bleeding and blistering, and though they still hurt “deep,” she recognizes that she has grown stronger than ever. The PCT has gotten easier, Cheryl thinks—“but that [is] different from it getting easy.”

Even though there are stretches of miles where Cheryl feels peaceful and strong and capable, there are stretches where she feels cranky and bone-tired. She is feeling the latter way when she reaches Shelter Cove Resort, a store and campground surrounded by rustic cabins on a lake called Odell—her next stop on the trail. Cheryl pays to stay the night so that she can collect her package in the morning, then has a snack of chips and lemonade before taking a luxurious shower in the bathhouse.

Later, as Cheryl sits in front of the store, three young men come out of the door and approach her. They tell her they’ve been following her a long way and reading her notes in the various trail registers along the PCT—they introduce themselves as Rick, Josh, and Richie. They ask Cheryl what her trail name is, and she says she doesn’t have one. They tell her their trail name is “the Three Young Bucks.” They’ve been hiking from the Mexican border and have gone straight through without bypassing the Sierras, traversing over twenty miles a day. Cheryl is impressed by these “hiking machines.” 

Being around the Bucks lightens Cheryl’s mood—but the next morning, when she goes with them to collect her care package from the post office, she is thrown into crisis mode after she realizes that she forgot to pack her regular twenty dollars in this box. It is 143 miles to her next stop, and she has only six dollars and twelve cents in her pocket. Cheryl assures herself she’ll be fine—there’s nowhere to spend money on the trail, anyway—and soon heads out with the Three Young Bucks, stopping for breaks with them throughout the day. Late that afternoon, though, they push forward past where Cheryl wants to make camp, and she bids them goodbye, hopeful she’ll meet up with them again.

Cheryl presses onward through the Oregonian mountains, and a couple days after parting from the Three Young Bucks, she takes a small detour to the Elk Lake Resort for some food. After ordering a hamburger and soda, she has only two cents left in her pocket. As Cheryl considers the fact that she’s now flat broke, she realizes that the poverty she experienced in her childhood has actually prepared her well for the low-budget living she’s done on the PCT.

Cheryl hikes onward to a mountain formation called the Three Sisters and finds that the trails are no longer hers alone—she keeps running into backpackers, day hikers, and scout troops. Everyone Cheryl meets is kind and interested in her odyssey, and a couple of hikers even share some beers with her as a good-luck gesture. On the other side of the Three Sisters, the landscape is less lush, and Cheryl finds herself alone again. As evening approaches and the temperature drops, Cheryl looks frantically for a safe place to camp. She hears the yips of coyotes in the distance, and as she gets into her tent for the night, her headlamp lands on a shining pair of eyes in the distance. 

The next day, after hiking dense forest all afternoon, Cheryl stops to make camp near a pond. Two bow hunters—men in their thirties, one with sandy hair and one with red hair—soon approach her and ask if she has any water to spare. Cheryl is intimidated by the men’s weapons—knives, bows, and arrows—and tells them that they can drink water from the pond, but must filter it first. She offers to share her water purifier with them, and even shows them how to use it—but when they tell her that they haven’t had anything but Pepsi all day, Cheryl lets them drink right from her already-purified supply. The men give her a strange feeling, and Cheryl, trusting her gut, is trying to get them to leave her be as quickly as possible.

The men stay around, though, to pump some water into their empty Pepsi cans. Cheryl grows frustrated when she looks over at the men and realizes they’re using her pump wrong—they have clogged it with mud from the bottom of the pond, and now there’s no way for any of them to purify the water. Cheryl tells the men their best bet is now the iodine tablets, and spares them a couple so that they can drink some water. As the three of them wait for the tablets to work, the sandy-haired man asks Cheryl probing questions about what she’s doing out in the wilderness all alone, fixated on the fact that she’s a woman by herself. Both men make lewd comments about Cheryl’s body and appearance, further upsetting her.

Cheryl tells the men that she’s heading out from the campsite before dark. The men say they’re leaving, too, and head onwards. After they depart, Cheryl wonders if she really has to pick up and leave—she’s afraid there won’t be a good spot for camping further on. She decides to stay, but as she begins fixing dinner, the sandy-haired man reappears and accuses her of trying to “trick” him and his friend. He makes more comments about Cheryl’s body. Cheryl tells him he should get going before dark, but the man retorts that it’s a “free country.” His redheaded friend comes up the trail, chiding him for wandering away and urging him to move on. As the men walk away, the sandy-haired one tells Cheryl to look out for herself. He raises his Pepsi can and makes a toast “to a young girl all alone in the woods.”

Cheryl tries to tell herself that nothing happened, and she’s fine—she just came across some “creepy” guys. Still, something in Cheryl’s gut tells her to pack up and move on. In spite of the darkness falling all around her and her half-finished dinner on the stove, Cheryl quickly packs up her camp, loads Monster onto her back, and starts walking in the opposite direction of the men. When she feels she can’t walk another step, she begins running.