Wild begins with Cheryl pulling a bloody toenail off of her foot. It's about pain, the kind of pain that demands you do something about it or it will plague you with every step you take. The opening shot tells us a great deal about the journey Cheryl is on. We see that she is on a journey of literally a thousand miles, and that she simply needs to keep going. It is not about the physical nature of her walk though, it's about what is happening in her mind. And, we see this throughout the film with the use of flashbacks which are not just flashbacks, but more what is being replayed in Cheryl's mind.
These are the things that Cheryl is walking out--her mother's death and the effects of her infidelity. She has plunged into a depth of hell of her own making and she's going to walk through every inch of it no matter how horrible in order to find the woman that her mother believed her to be. Her journey on the PCT is about discovering who she knows she is, getting back to her true self. And finding oneself in the midst of nature is as brutal and challenging as any other form of self-discovery in that all of the comforts of life are taken away, and you are face to face with problems that you have to overcome, and if you don't there is a chance you could die. And the film centers on Cheryl's ability and willingness to face the pain and the process head on and not to steer away from it in any way, but to go through it in order to come out reattached to who she really is.
This is why her coming to the Bridge of the Gods is such a critical point. She has come out of nature, the brutality of existing outside of the comforts of life and the choices we make to numb ourselves and she is made whole. And walking onto the bridge is a symbol of her reconnecting to her life, to society, to the world in a way that is new, but most importantly that is her.
