There is a larger Democratic fantasy being enacted here. The smiley sightings project an idea of enclaves — perhaps deep in the woods of Chappaqua, or in the stacks of an indie bookstore — where the fear and depression felt by many after the election does not loom. The Huffington Post called it a “peaceful alternate universe.” If the woman who bested Mr. Trump as a debater, and in the popular vote, can put on a brave face and head out on a brisk hike, these selfies say, then perhaps there is hope for her supporters, too. One woman who encountered Mrs. Clinton in the woods tagged her selfie with the hashtag #lightfollowsdarkness. At Quartz, the writer Lux Alptraum read a feminist political message into the selfies. Mrs. Clinton’s “makeup free look,” she wrote, is “one last middle finger to the patriarchy.” She added, “If there’s any silver lining to this election mess, it’s that after 40 years of scrutiny and stricture, Hillary Clinton is finally, triumphantly, human again.”

But there is another way of looking at these images from the left. While some are warmed by the shots, others are exhausted by a meme that exalts a Clinton whose candidacy helped torpedo the Democratic Party to its lowest political power in years.

“Dear Hillary Clinton,” Jamie Peck wrote on the left-leaning music and culture site Death and Taxes, “please stay in the woods forever.”

Or as the writer Alana Levinson put it, “I don’t want to live in a world where ‘Hillary Clinton Hiking Selfie’ is a genre.”