Quote Originally Posted by Miner View Post
She didn't start at Campo. She started at Tehachappi which makes the mileage a little over 100 miles to Kennedy Meadows. It's my understanding that they filmed most of it in Oregon (and often not on the PCT itself due to wanting easy access each day).
In the movie, she started at the Mexican border - I've not read the book, so don't know where she actually started. Kennedy Meadows must be 400-500 miles up trail from Mexico. That was an incongruity, as was, perhaps the desert "north" of Reno. Does the PCT wend extensively though desert territory between Reno/Tahoe area and Ore border? That was a head-scratcher. There definitely is desert in Nev and Ore north of Reno, but I was unaware of the PCT traversing it.

One thing the film didn't cover explicitly, but rather inferentially and just visually, was Cheryl's greatly increased strength as a hiker as she progressed. She got much studier and nimbler with time.

As re: her fellow hikers and her other relationships as portrayed, I thought she had superb respect and appreciation from her fellow hikers, mostly men. I thought her relationship with her mom and her brother was a jumble of love and dysfunction and conflicted emotion, with an emphasis on conflict and dysfuncntion, though the love was clearly strong. It wasn't portrayed as uniformly positive, but that's because, from Cheryl's telling, it wasn't. And I'd be her brother and mom would agree were they both able and willing to chime in.

In short, to me, her relationships with others were given what seemed to be a fair reading, a mix of good and bad, to put it simplistically.