Cheryl Strayed

16 of 21
Though she originally planned to end her journey in a town just over the Oregon border, Cheryl decided to trek on to the Oregon-Washington border. Here she stands at Crater Lake, once a mountain and now the deepest lake in the United States. "This was once a wasteland of lava and pumice and ash. But hard as I tried, I couldn't see them in my mind's eye," Cheryl writes. "There was only the stillness and the silence of that water: what a mountain and a wasteland and an empty bowl turned into after the healing began."