Wild: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Frank drives Cheryl to his house and goes inside to tell his wife what’s going on. The two of them come outside a few moments later and urge Cheryl to come inside and make herself at home. Frank’s wife quickly fixes Cheryl a plate of barbeque, corn, and potato salad, and urges Cheryl to eat even though she and Frank haven’t sat down yet. Cheryl hungrily digs into the delicious food. The next morning, Frank drives Cheryl to a convenience store and suggests she catch a ride to a nearby town called Ridgecrest. Cheryl catches a ride with a trucker named Troy, and they exchange life stories along the way. He drops her at an outdoor supply store, and the owner helps Cheryl dismantle, clean, and repair her stove. He sells her the right kind of gas and walks her through lighting and extinguishing it before letting her go.

Cheryl decides to stay in town for the night before heading back out on the trail. She stops at a grocery store and stocks up on food, then checks in at a motel where the kind owner offers to wash Cheryl’s dirty hiking clothes for her. As they make conversation, the owner tells Cheryl that there’s been an excessive amount of snow on the Sierra Nevada this year, and it’s “entirely socked in”: in hiking lingo, impenetrable. Cheryl’s guidebooks warned her there would be snow on the mountains, but the idea that an irregular snowfall might prevent her from hiking them never occurred to her.

The next day, Cheryl receives a ride back to the trail from a woman who works for the Bureau of Land Management. The woman confirms that it has been a record snowfall, but doesn’t know the extent of the blockage up in the mountains. In spite of the uncertainty now ahead of her, Cheryl feels confident as she gets back on the trail, leaves civilization, successfully cooks her first hot meal, and pitches camp for the night.

The next day, as Cheryl continues her journey, she tries to ignore the pain coursing through her body with every step. From her blistered feet to her chafed skin to her screaming muscles, she is riddled with agony. Cheryl must climb her way over four rockslides throughout the course of the day, and by the time she makes camp, though she’s only traveled eight and a half miles, she is exhausted. The next day is full of “merciless” heat, and Cheryl experiences exhaustion and dehydration as she pushes her way forward along the trail. She stops “every ten minutes to rest for five.” She tries to find shade and stay cool and hydrated, but her body uses every ounce of water it has, and she struggles to stay focused and motivated. She even tells herself that once she gets to Kennedy Meadows, she will quit the entire hike.

Cheryl is frustrated that though she set off on the hike to think about her life, her choices, and her mistakes in order to get back to an earlier, better version of herself, she has barely had any time to consider the great questions of her life—her failed marriage, her grief over her mother, her addictive tendencies. She has been focused only on moving forward and surviving.

After an exhausting day in the heat, Cheryl at last reaches her next water source—Spanish Needle Creek. It is a cold, shallow creek, and Cheryl bathes naked in the water after pumping it into her bottles and purifying it with iodine tablets. The next morning, she decides to stay by the creek for a couple of hours—she is dreading getting back on the murderously hot trail. As she soaks in the water, she decides not to press forward to Kennedy Meadows—she wants to get off the trail.

As Cheryl packs her things, she hears a voice call out to her and address her by name. She turns around to see a man approaching. He introduces himself as Greg and explains that he saw Cheryl’s name on the trail register—he has, he says, been following in her footsteps for days. As Cheryl and Greg talk and get to know one another, it becomes clear that he is an experienced backpacker who has been preparing to hike the PCT for years. Greg reveals his extensive knowledge of nearly everything about the trail—and tells Cheryl he’s been averaging twenty-two miles a day. Cheryl lies and says she’s been covering twelve.

Greg and Cheryl discuss the snow on the Sierra Nevada. Greg is just as concerned about what to do ahead as she is. They make a plan to rendezvous at Kennedy Meadows and make a plan from there, along with the other hikers on the trail. Before taking off again, Greg commends Cheryl for her bravery and intrepidness—he tells her she is the only solo woman hiker he’s met on the trail or seen on the register.

The next day, Cheryl hikes through the heat with “new determination.” She doesn’t think about quitting once. With Greg serving as her “guiding star,” she presses on through the rapidly-shifting terrain. Even though she encounters a bear as well as a rattlesnake, Cheryl remains focused on the path ahead. As Cheryl continues on, she decides to nickname her backpack “Monster.” Even though her relationship with it started off as adversarial, she now sees the backpack as an ally and even an extension of herself—it contains all she needs to survive.

Cheryl makes camp after an unfortunate encounter with an army of black ants and sleeps soundly through the night, exhausted from exertion and fright. In the morning, she feels tired: her feet are swollen and her muscles are stiff. As she is packing up her camp, a pair of hikers comes by—Albert and Matt, a father-and-son team from Georgia who are hiking the trail start to finish. The company makes Cheryl “giddy,” even when Albert questions how stuffed “Monster” is and asks her about her urination patterns.

Albert and Matt tell Cheryl there are two more men behind them on the trail, Doug and Tom, before departing and heading on. Cheryl packs up her camp quickly and hikes forward hard, determined not to let Doug and Tom catch up with her—she doesn’t want to keep getting passed by better hikers. As she presses on, she finds herself thinking that hiking the PCT is the hardest thing she’s ever done. She is shocked by the thought as soon as she has it—for so long, she thought losing her mother was the hardest thing she’d ever have to do. Cheryl is both relieved and confused to find that hiking the PCT is hard “in a way that ma[kes] the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard.”

Cheryl begins daydreaming about her arrival at Kennedy Meadows. She is excited to introduce herself as an official “PCT hiker,” and to use her new name—Cheryl Strayed. After her divorce from Paul, she took advantage of the opportunity to change her last name from the hyphenated combination of her maiden name and Paul’s last name to something new. When the word strayed came to her one day, she knew that “its layered definitions spoke directly to [her] life,” and reminded her of how, though she’d wandered from the path, she learned new things from “the wild places [her] straying had brought [her]”. 

Cheryl continues reflecting on the dissolution of her marriage to Paul. After signing and mailing their notarized, finalized divorce papers, Cheryl recalls, she and Paul embraced in the street as snow fell all around them, whispering regrets and apologies to one another. Cheryl considered inviting Paul over for one last afternoon in bed together, but ultimately she “didn’t have the heart.” She recalls that when Paul bid her goodbye, he addressed her for the first time as “Cheryl Strayed” just before they parted ways.