"We all have a place, a city park, a mountain trail, a desert flower, a perfect beach break. Some place that brings us outside. Outside our work, outside our lives, outside ourselves. We might share them with others, but they feel like they are just for us. Most often, they are not. These places, as natural and beautiful and untouched as they seem, are larger than us. To exist, these places require effort. So understand the places you love. Learn who works to protect them, and who makes decisions on their behalf. Give your efforts to these places, and truly get outside." — Amy Morrison Stay Wild Magazine, Spring 2015, insert
"The view changed incrementally every few dozen steps, and after 50 iPhone photos, you kind of feel like you’ve captured it, but of course you haven’t. When you’re walking somewhere like that, you know it’s special, but you don’t know that years later you’ll feel like maybe you rushed it. Maybe you will make it back there again, maybe you won’t, and it for sure would be different, and even if it’s not different you’ll be a little different, so the whole thing won’t be the same anyway. But damn, what a view." — Brendan Leonard Semi-Rad, "Walking the Knife Edge of Switzerland’s Hardergrat"
"Every living thing has the same wish to flourish again and again. Beyond that, our differences are quibbles. I do not want to be a lonely species set adrift from all the rest." — Craig Childs The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
"When my companion finally turns and walks into the meadow toward the road, I linger. I am not ready to render myself back into a human being, not ready to return to a car and an asphalt highway. I want to stay just a moment longer. I peer into the forest, where every bit of darkness and light has a face, a set of eyes looking out at me. Nothing emerges. I feel the tug at my back, my friend walking away, and I turn to catch up and become human again." — Craig Childs The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
"When the aromatic savour of the pine goes searching into the deepest recesses of my lungs, I know it is life that is entering." — Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
"In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll begin to see something, maybe." — Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
"The miracle was that each moment in our lives connected in a long chain to make a unique story, that it was all mystery, that we could shudder in the face of death and also laugh, that we could share burdens with each other, that a succulent could grow in a crack in the midst of all this stone and release oxygen in to the world so that I could live, that love remained waiting. There is wonder in noticing and contemplating and being a part of instead of separate from. In knowing that a thing, if done right, is filled with truth. I climbed. At the top of the wall was the start of my return to Michelle—another place to begin. Right here is also a place to begin, I thought." — Matt Spohn Alpinist Magazine, Issue 65, "Ground Up"
"We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness." — Edward Abbey
"There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep." — Edward Abbey The Monkey Wrench Gang
"A vertical cactus garden grows from the wall, as though micro-fissures in the stone have blown clusters of prickly bubbles." — Amanda Tarr Forrest Alpinist Magazine, Issue 65, "Homecoming"
"I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me." — Laurie Lee As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
"Let the stillness reach a hollowed-out place inside your body—its resonance, loud in its own quietness, expansive in the way of wild. … Do you believe amid the thrum of modern life the sound of any inner silence might become a fable told only under the cover of stars, fading light-years away?" — Sarah Audsley Alpinist Magazine, Issue 65, "An Astonishing Plentitude"
"We believe there are backpacking activities which, if pursued conscientiously, become like Yoga exercises: they give you a clearer understanding and a palpable relationship with your immediate world. We believe that simply walking in the backcountry—taking photographs of nature, painting pictures of it, studying flowers, trees, mosses, and ferns, listening and watching for birds—engenders a special relationship with nature that is unlike any you can find sitting in your living room, or in an office, in a lecture hall, in a church, reading a book, or listening to music. It is a unique relationship. It is an ineluctable relationship. And if you open yourself up to it, let it seep into you, you become a changed person." — The Editor Backpacker Magazine, Issue 1, 1973
"Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond." — Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
"This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls." — John Muir John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
"I have written of inanimate things, rock and water, frost and sun; and it might seem as though this were not a living world. But I have wanted to come to the living things through the forces that create them, for the mountain is one and indivisible, and rock, soil, water and air are no more integral to it than what grows from the soil and breathes the air. All are aspects of one entity, the living mountain. The disintegrating rock, the nurturing rain, the quickening sun, the seed, the root, the bird—all are one." — Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
"For the duller and fainter we became the clearer was our vision, though only in momentary glimpses. Then, after the sky cleared, we gazed at the stars, blessed immortals of light, shining with marvelous brightness with long lance rays, near-looking and new-looking, as if never seen before." — John Muir Steep Trails
"I had not known that the sunrise was so lavish and that you could actually feel the color when it reached your face." — Craig Childs The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
"Where the water fell clear of the rock icicles hang, thick as a thigh, many feet in length, and sometimes when the wind blows the falling water askew as it freezes, the icicles are squint. I have seen icicles like a scimitar blade in shape, firm and solid in their place. For once, even the wind has been fixed." — Nan Shepherd The Living Mountain
"Taking the same trail in the opposite direction is like walking on the other side of time. Everything looks different on the way back. Same trees, same stobs and snags. Same switchbacks and curves; same vistas, same fallen tree bridge across the creek. But going back the way you came, it’s just as easy to lose your footing, but it’s harder to get lost. The light shines on things you didn’t notice on the way there. The path back, it’s the story you tell yourself, afterward." — Alexis M. Smith Marrow Island
