Emily M-H’s Reviews > Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail > Status Update
Emily M-H
is on page 229 of 315
Stacy would be meeting her friend Dee so they could hike through Oregon together, but I'd forever be alone. And why? What did being alone do? Im not afraid, I said, calling up my old mantra to calm my mind.
But it didn't feel the same as it usually did to say it. Perhaps because that wasn't entirely true anymore.
Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.
— Feb 17, 2026 11:45AM
But it didn't feel the same as it usually did to say it. Perhaps because that wasn't entirely true anymore.
Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.
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Emily’s Previous Updates
Emily M-H
is on page 273 of 315
This was once a mountain that stood nearly 12,000 feet tall and then had its heart removed.
But hard as I tried, I couldn't see them in my mind's eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore.
There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.
— Feb 19, 2026 12:08PM
But hard as I tried, I couldn't see them in my mind's eye. Not the mountain or the wasteland or the empty bowl. They simply were not there anymore.
There was only the stillness and silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began.
Emily M-H
is on page 272 of 315
The Klamath tribe still considered the lake a sacred site and I could see why. I wasn't a skeptic about this. It didn't matter that all around me there were tourists taking pictures and driving slowly past in their cars. I could feel the lake's power.
— Feb 19, 2026 12:07PM
Emily M-H
is on page 260 of 315
It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty.
Like there was something I didn't even know I wanted until I didn't get it.
— Feb 19, 2026 12:00PM
Like there was something I didn't even know I wanted until I didn't get it.
Emily M-H
is on page 258 of 315
What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?
What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done?
— Feb 19, 2026 11:57AM
What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done?
Emily M-H
is on page 207 of 315
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.
— Feb 17, 2026 12:16PM
Emily M-H
is on page 207 of 315
It was the thing that had 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.
— Feb 17, 2026 12:16PM
Emily M-H
is on page 207 of 315
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.
— Feb 17, 2026 12:13PM
Emily M-H
is on page 234 of 315
I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.
— Feb 17, 2026 11:47AM
Emily M-H
is on page 234 of 315
I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn't crying because I was happy. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full. Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and of the 9,760 days that had come before them too.
— Feb 17, 2026 11:47AM
Emily M-H
is on page 229 of 315
When I reached the trail on the other side, I felt stupid and weak and sorry for myself, vulnerable in a way I hadn't felt on the trail before, envious of the couples who had each other
— Feb 17, 2026 11:44AM
