I'd read the section in my guidebook about the trail's history the winter before, but it wasn't until now–a couple of miles out of Burney Falls, as I walked in my flimsy sandals in the early evening heat–that the realization of what that story meant picked up force and hit me squarely in the chest: preposterous as it was, when Catherine Montgomery and Clinton Clarke and Warren Rogers and the hundreds of others who'd created the PCT had imagined the people who would walk that high trail that wound down the heights of our western mountains, they'd been imagining me. It didn't matter that everything from my cheap knockoff sandals to my high-tech-by-1995-standards boots and backpack would have been foreign to them, because what mattered was utterly timeless. It was the thing that compelled them to fight for the trail against all the odds, and it was the thing that drove me and every other long-distance hiker onward on the most miserable days. It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. That's what Montgomery knew, I supposed. And what Clarke knew and Rogers and what thousands of people who preceded and followed them knew. It was what I knew before I even really did, before I could have known how truly hard and glorious the PCT would be, how profoundly the trail would both shatter and shelter me. . Cheryl Strayed
About This Quote

The trail is a physical leg of the trail is a physical leg of the American highway system. It's the backbone of America's wilderness, for most people it's their entrée into wilderness, or their first time into real wilderness. I set out on the PCT at the start of my career as an editor. I had no idea what kind of editor I would become, but I knew that my life would be changed by this trail, so after I finished it I wanted to keep writing about it. And now here I am with these words in my hands, living out this dream.

Source: Wild: From Lost To Found On The Pacific Crest Trail

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