Wild boot3

Chris Kesting holds the boot he found at the base of a cliff near Mt. Hood Skibowl, right where Reese Witherspoon threw it while filming the opening scene of "Wild."

(Photo by Tim Pate)

In the opening scene of "Wild," Reese Witherspoon sits down at the edge of a cliff and takes off her too-small hiking boots. Her toes are black and bloody, and she pulls off her right big toenail and throws it over the cliff, knocking one of her boots over in the process.

Exhausted and frustrated, Witherspoon throws the other boot after it while screaming a profanity. It's a cathartic moment, one that drew strong reactions when the movie was released in December.

Some people thought "Wow, Reese Witherspoon is a brave actress who really got inside Cheryl Strayed's head. I loved the book, and I'm going to love this movie!"

Others thought "Whoa, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail is difficult enough with a pack that heavy, and now you're throwing away your boots? Uh, oh."

Chris Kesting, a mechanical engineer from Camas, Wash., and an avid hiker, said "Hey, I know exactly where that is. One of these days it might be fun to go up there and see if that boot is actually there."

So he did. And it was.

The scene from "Wild," the movie based on Portland writer Strayed's memoir, was filmed in the fall of 2013 near Mt. Hood Skibowl, on the south side of Mount Hood near Government Camp. Kesting recognized it immediately because he'd been in the area recently and saw Tom Dick and Harry Mountain in the background. Kesting and a friend, Tim Pate, hiked the popular trail on March 8, one of the sunny, snow-free days in early spring, and had no trouble finding the boot-tossing spot. (The film crew used a chairlift and then hiked over.) Kesting scrambled around the cliffs and searched for about 15 minutes until he saw something in the middle of a scree slope.

"The thing that stood out was the red laces," he said. "The brown of the leather blended into the soil and I didn't see that at all. I saw the red laces and thought it was weird that there were flowers out already. That's when it came into focus. It was kind of funny."

But is that really the "Wild" boot?

"Well, first of all you wouldn't find a single boot in a place where nobody would leave a boot," Kesting said. "It has red laces and it's a 61/2 woman's size Danner boot, made in Portland. If you look at the movie poster, it's that boot. You can tell the manufacturing date on it, 2013, so it's relatively new, but you could tell it had been sitting out in the sun for quite a bit of time. It was bleached out and had been sitting in that spot for awhile."

Yep, that's the one. Danner made the boots Witherspoon wore in the movie and is selling them as the Mountain Light Cascade. (Strayed wore different boots when she hiked the PCT in 1995.) The company made 25 pairs for the movie to show various stages of wear and use as Witherspoon moved along the trail. The movie crew left one boot behind. (But not two: Kesting and Pate went back later and did a thorough search but couldn't find the second boot.)

Kesting keeps the boot on a bookshelf in his house and laughs at how the "Wild" crew -- which shot all but seven scenes in Oregon and was noted for its low-impact style -- violated "leave no trace" principles with one stray boot.

"They're not supposed to leave stuff around when they film and I thought they would send somebody down to pick it up," he said. "It was pretty hard to find so maybe even if they did that they couldn't find it.

"I thought it would be fun to do but there would be no way I would find it ... It's really a pretty spot. If you turn around 180 (degrees), Mount Hood is right in your face. It's beautiful there."

-- Jeff Baker

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