Wild: Mystery of the Ski Pole

Today you get a short and easy one! This little ingot is such a dumb mistake I don't even know what to think of it. 

In the chapter "The Only Girl in the Woods" which in of itself is a rather pretentious title and belies a level of self-centeredness briefly touched upon in the comments of my last post, Ms. Strayed talks about the ski-pole she found in the PCT hiker free box at the Kennedy Meadows General Store. 
Her description of it: 
"It was a ski-pole fit for a princess: white, white a bubble-gum-pink nylon wrist strap."

Now compare that to this photo of Cheryl with the ski-pole in question.
(Please let me know if this link stops working. I have a feeling this will disappear at some point)

The photo is of Cheryl with Joshua, one of the "Three Young Bucks" she describes in Wild. 
BTW, anyone else think that "monster" doesn't really look all that big compared to Joshua's?  
This was supposedly taken near Odell Lake. I say supposedly because with Cheryl, who the hell knows. Anyway, notice anything about the "ski-pole" she is carrying? Where's the pink? This is so prominent in the story (the ski pole is mentioned 18 times in the book) that they made sure the one used by Reese Witherspoon in the movie was also pink. 

I checked the rest of book and she never mentions losing it or swapping it for another. Lord knows she littered the trail with all the other gear she lost or dropped, why wouldn't she have also mentioned the loss of her princess-stick? 

So what does this mean? 

This is an example of the type of inconsistency that would be explained by Hypothesis #1, that most of the "memoir" was either exaggerated or just completely made up. 

"Why would she do that?" you might ask. Does this sound exciting to you? "I walked out of the store with an armload of junk food to stuff in my face. I saw a ski-pole that someone left in a box outside the store, so I took it." 

No, I'll give Strayed credit, she knew she needed to spice up this otherwise mundane story and the pink strap is an example of her throwing a little pepper here and there. Maybe I'm throwing credit around too liberally, her editor probably told her to do it (oh hey, maybe you might have shot heroin the day before you started hiking, how bout that?) She didnt think anything of it because this is one of the more benign examples of her dipping into her literary "spice-rack." By the time she decided to throw in a pink-strapped pole, she had already created a fictional reality that rivals Tolkien's, filled with bears and bulls and llamas and sasquatches (sasquatchi?). What's one little ski-pole compared to all that? 

I'm outta here....

Why'd she post the photo if it so clearly contradicts her story? Ah, now that my friends is a much more interesting question. In fact, this photo is quite interesting in many ways...which we'll explore soon.....

-Mercer