"The rope comes tight to my harness and I follow it into the maze of snow flutings. My movements feel in tune with our environment. A rhythmic tempo takes over my thoughts: I simply kick, step and breathe. Our line of ascent feels like water flowing uphill, naturally rolling through the terrain. An expression of life rather than a fight for survival." — Michael Gardner Alpinist Magazine, Issue 77, "Worth the Weight"
"If you are given two options, take the harder one because you’ll regret it if you don’t. At least if you take the harder one and fail, you’ll have tried." — Alison Hargreaves Interview
"Perhaps [Charles] Pratt's ultimate wisdom took the form of acceptance: understanding that veiled depths surround us. Which, like looming exposure, might suddenly jump at you. Or like serendipitous beauty, might delight. Both sensations are perfectly OK, equally wondrous. And the shapes they assume depend more on your mindset than on the thing itself." — Doug Robinson Alpinist Magazine, Issue 74, "Letters to a Young Climber"
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. ... Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." — Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." — Helen Keller The Open Door
"Fear can create a positive feedback loop. We are afraid, so we shrink and further invite the thing that scares us to occur. To beat the fear, to give ourselves a fighting chance at realizing the best possible outcome, we have to go all in and face it." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"Courage isn’t a matter of not being frightened, you know. It’s being afraid and doing what you have to do anyway." — 3rd Doctor Doctor Who, "Planet of the Daleks"
"It all boils down to fear. Fear is such a powerful emotion. Sometimes it keeps us safe, but more often, it keeps us from taking the risks that propel us forward. On the flip side, it can be a fantastic motivator." — Julie Hotz She Explores, Episode 2, "On Fear: Human Powered Travel"
"We are all existing on thin ice, not only in the mountains. Each loss evokes the often-invisible voids beneath our feet. Each threshold moment can seem to open a multitude of branching, alternative timelines, like the patterns of frost on a window, curling into infinite fractal forms, tracing phantom narratives of falls untaken, ice unbroken, illnesses uncaught, decisions unmade." — Katie Ives Alpinist Magazine, Issue 77, "Of Thin Ice"
"When the air chills, I, too, watch myself turn, temporarily, to crystal. Rime slowly forms along the loose strands of my hair, in thicker and thicker flowers of white and silver, encrusting my lashes until I have to rub my eyes or blink hard to keep my vision clear." — Katie Ives Alpinist Magazine, Issue 77, "Of Thin Ice"
"I've seen deep-green moss and delicate alpine plants glow emerald, burgundy and gold beneath a spume of translucent ice—safely beneath the reach of my sharp axe and crampon points—like miniature worlds of living things preserved in giant drops of amber or globes of glass." — Katie Ives Alpinist Magazine, Issue 77, "Of Thin Ice"
"The mountains do not exist for our amusement. They owe us nothing, and they ask nothing of us." — The Freedom of the Hills
"We are shaped and fashioned by what we love." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I bet they’d live a lot differently. When you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day." — Bill Watterson Calvin and Hobbs
"I wonder how [children] will imagine the infinite when they have never seen how the stars fill a dark night sky." — Barbara Kingsolver Small Wonder
"The wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned to ask." — Nancy Newhall
"Public lands instruct in the value of respecting differences. We may all be endowed with a love of nature, but that passion takes many forms. Public lands must accommodate multiple uses because there are multiple publics whose wishes point in all directions. … Such differences don’t have to fester into divisions. The duck hunter and the birdwatcher may have their own ideas about the highest value of a wetland. Yet both know that without public protection, there might not be a wetland at all…. America’s public lands teach the etiquette of sharing. They instruct is in the manners of coexistence, cooperation, and consideration toward each other. … Such humility can remind us that even though we may find the culture and politics of others to be incomprehensible, their desire to find happiness in the natural world is much the same as our own." — Jason Mark Sierra Magazine, July/August 2020 Issue, "In Public Lands is the Preservation of the Republic"
"I feel the urge to share these wild places with everyone, but I also covet the solitude that is only possible in places where humans are scarce." — Rebecca Robinson Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land
"I’d had this idea that I could push myself physically through anything if I was tough and smart and rugged, and that the push would show me something about myself and my place on the river. That being able to do things alone was a sign of strength, not fear. I’d thought I could conquer the landscape and fully understand the problem of water use. But none of that is true. The tough part is connection, looking across lines and knowing when to push the lever on what you think is right." — Heather Hansman Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West
"It’s more interesting and fun to honor the reality that no two redwoods are the same, and that if you’ve seen one redwood … you’ve seen one redwood. We are sustained by each redwood truly seen, and we evolve by understanding and being inspired by the differences between each tree, person, culture, mountain range, and creature of the earth. The Funhogs of 1968 were on the road of realizing in each present moment the truism of the iconic John Muir’s observation: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” If you’ve seen one redwood, you’re connected to them all." — Dick Dorworth Climbing Fitz Roy, 1968, "Viva los Funhogs"
