Literary Ruralism (Part XXV): Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Sierra City, California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2017

I've been reading (or, more precisely, listening to the audiobook) Wild:  Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed (2012).  It is her memoir of hiking the "PCT," the common acronym for the Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches from the Mexican border to the Canadian border, through the Sierra Nevada Mountains (in its various iterations/sub-ranges) and then the Cascade Range.  Much of the "action" takes place in areas/places so remote as to not appear on any maps--that is, on any maps not of the PCT itself.

Others take places in the small towns where the trail crosses highways or where the trail is relatively near highways or settlements.  These are places where wilderness meets rural.  Here's just one, in Inyo County, specifically Lone Pine, population 2,035. Another is Ridgecrest, population 27,616, on the edge of sparsely populated Kern County, which includes the city of Bakersfield.

Interestingly, I recently wrote about Lone Pine in relation to the coronavirus, and I have recently written about Ridgecrest in relation to earthquakes, as in this post. I took some great photos when I passed through Sierra City (Sierra County) two summers ago.

Here's the salient excerpt from Wild (pp. 123-24):

Together we descended Trail Pass two miles down to a picnic area and campground at Horseshoe Meadows, where we met up with Doug and Tom and hitched a ride into Lone Pine. I hadn’t planned to go there. Some PCT hikers had resupply boxes sent to Lone Pone, but I’d planned to push through to the town of Independence, another fifty trail miles to the north. I still had a few days’ worth of food in my bag, but when we reached town I went immediately to a grocery store to replenish my stock. I needed enough to last for the ninety-six-mile section I’d be hiking once I made the bypass, from Sierra City to Belden Town. Afterwards, I found a pay phone and called Lisa and left a message on her answering machine, explaining my new plan as quickly as I could, asking her to send my box addressed to Belden Town immediately and hold all the others until I gave her the details of my new itinerary.

* * *  

I walked with Greg to the convenience store that doubled as the town’s Greyhound bus station. We passed bars that billed themselves as Old West saloons and shops that had cowboy hats and framed paintings of men astride bucking broncos displayed in their front windows. 

“You ever see High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart?” Greg asked.  

I shook my head. 

“That was made here. Plus lots of other movies. Westerns.” 

I nodded, unsurprised. The landscape did in fact look straight out of Hollywood—a high sage-covered flat that was more barren than now, rocky and treeless that went on for miles. The white peaks of the Sierra Nevada to the west cut so dramatically up into the blue sky that they seemed almost unreal to me, a gorgeous façade. 

“There’s our ride,” Greg said, pointing to a big Greyhound bus in a parking lot of the store as we approached.

Sierra City Post Office, which serves many PCT hikers
 (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2017

Cheryl and Greg take Greyhound from Lone Pine to Reno, and then they switch to take a bus to Truckee. From there, they hitchhike to Sierra City, population 221, which I wrote about here. 

From Sierra City (Sierra County), Cheryl heads to Belden Town (Plumas County), where her next box of supplies awaits her at the post office, with $20 cash she'll spend on a shower, some Snapple Lemonade and few other small luxuries.

Sierra City, California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2017