outdoors quotes

[Nik]

"From time to time everybody needs a little bit of desert. "
(Sven Hedin, Swedish geographer and explorer)

 

[xjblue]

"A thorough traveler must be something of a geologist, something of a botanist, an archaeologist, an ornithologist, an artist, a philosopher, and so on. Through it all he is likely to be friendly with a camera. He must be agreeable in society, contented in solitude, enthusiastic and patient as a fisherman."—Dave Rust

 

[gnwatts]

Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.

Edward Abbey

 

[gnwatts]

"On the summit of the opposite wall are rock forms that we do not understand"

John Wesley Powell, on a reconnoiter above his camp at the junction of the Green, Grand and Colorado, 1867.
I think from his description he was looking at the Maze.

 

[Nick]

"So we have a curious ensemble of wonderful features – carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds and monuments. From which of these features shall we select a name? We decide to call it Glen Canyon."

- John Wesley Powell, August 3rd, 1869

 

[Nick]

"Back to the earth, back to who I am and who I am not, back to my kin, the sandstone in my veins."

-Katie Lee

 

[Laura]

Worth posting again: "Don't just bang down the trail thinking about your girlfriend or your stock portfolio. Go like another animal. All of a sudden you're part of an ancient system again: You stop, listen more often, scent the wind. And after four or five days something happens. You're part of the original landscape, a far older, more faded world.

If you're comfortable with yourself, go solo. Solitude is the deepest well I know, and it's your right to drink from it."

-Doug Peacock

 

[balzaccom]

“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

Seems like John Muir has been missing from this thread...

 

[slc_dan]

Seems like John Muir has been missing from this thread...

I'll echo that sentiment.

"Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up Here all the world's prizes seem nothing."

 

[Tye Dye Twins]

"As a man walking alone in the mountains, if I say something and there is no woman around to here it, am I still wrong?"
- Middle Aged Mutant Ninja Turtle from Dude Your Screwed

 

[Ben]

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T. S. Eliot

 

[Absarokanaut]

I am quite surprised that one of the arguable fathers of Wilderness in our country has not been represented.

“Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac with Other Essays on Conservation from Round River

“But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.”
― Aldo Leopold

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?”
― Aldo Leopold

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
― Aldo Leopold

 

[Seldom Seen Anderson]

I've been reading Stegner's "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian", in which he quotes Clarence Dutton (I believe from "Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah"). Speaking specifically of Utah's plateau province:

The lover of nature, whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, Germany, or New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras, in Scotland or Colorado, would enter this strange region with a shock, and dwell there for a time with a sense of oppression and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever things he had learned to regard as beautiful and noble he would seldom or never see, and whatsoever he might see would appear to him as anything but beautiful and noble. Whatsoever might be bold or striking would at first seem only grotesque. The colors would be the very ones he had learned to shun as tawdry and bizarre. The tones and shades, modest and tender, subdued yet rich, in which his fancy had always taken special delight, would be the ones which are conspicuously absent. But time would bring a gradual change. Some day he would suddenly become conscious that outlines which at first seemed harsh and trivial have grace and meaning; that forms which seemed grotesque are full of dignity; that magnitudes which had added enormity to coarseness have become replete with strength and even majesty; that colors which had been esteemed unrefined, immodest, and glaring, are as expressive, tender, changeful, and capacious of effects as any others. Great innovations, whether in art or literature, in science or in nature, seldom take the world by storm. They must be understood before they can be estimated, and must be cultivated before they can be understood.

Dutton was such a bad ass writer! The best person to paint a word picture I have read! And he was a scientist (geologist)! Pretty odd for a scientist to speak with such flair. I help a buddy of mine with Ultra Races . I give the historic/geologic talk to the runners and I use dutton in nearly every one of my presentations. Here are a few more Dutton quotes.

Aquarius Plateau
""Its broad summit is clad with dense forests of spruces opening in grassy parks, and sprinkled with scores of lakes filled by the melting snows. We have seen it afar off, its long straight crest-line stretched across the sky like the threshold of another world. On three sides, south, west, and east, it is walled by dark battlements of volcanic rock, and its long slopes beneath descend into the dismal desert. The explorer who sits upon the brink of its parapet looking off into the southern and eastern haze, who skirts its lava cap or clambers up and down its vast ravines, who builds his campfire by the borders of its snow fed lakes or stretches himself beneath its giant pines and spruces, forgets that he is a geologist and feels himself a poet . . . [I have] seen its dull, expressionless ramparts grow upward into walls of majestic proportions and sublime import."

Paunsaugunt Plateau
.."the surface breaks off almost perpendicularly to a depth of several hundred feet--seems, indeed, as though the bottom had dropped out and left rocks standing in all shapes and forms as lone Sentinels over the grotesque and picturesque scene. There are thousands of red, white, purple and vermillion colored rocks, of all sizes, resembling Sentinels on the Walls of Castles; monks and priests with their robes, attendants, cathedrals, and congregations. There are deep caverns and rooms resembling ruins of prisons, Castles, Churches, with their guarded walls, battlements, spires and steeples, niches and recesses, presenting the wildest and the most wonderful scene that the eye of man ever beheld, in fact, it is one of the wonders of the world."

 

[mak1277]

"But every eye was turned to the mountains. Forgotten now were the [natives] and missions while the word of God was being read in these majestic hieroglyphics blazoned along the sky. The earnest, childish wonderment with which this glorious page of Nature's Bible was contemplated was delightful to see." - J. Muir, Travels in Alaska

 

[George]

You may be a little cold some nights, on mountain tops above the timber-line, but you will see the stars, and by and by you can sleep enough in your town bed, or at least in your grave.
- John Muir

 

[Artemus]

Ascend to Safety!
- langutah - in the face of serious climbing difficulties with approaching heavy weather (course I think I picked it up from one of the ridiculous Hollywood climbing movies)

 

[Nick]

This one is kind of outdoors, and kind of not. I'd never heard it before just now and I quite liked it.

"Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way." -John Muir

 

[slc_dan]

This one is kind of outdoors, and kind of not. I'd never heard it before just now and I quite liked it.

"Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way." -John Muir

Makes me think of the our show of Raven vs. Osprey. Amazing.

 

[Vegan.Hiker]

This one is kind of outdoors, and kind of not. I'd never heard it before just now and I quite liked it.

"Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way." -John Muir

Love this.. Many layers of meaning there.

 

[Wyatt Carson]

These are all very good...but excuse me, I like the eating scenes LOL

Japhy got out the tea, Chinese tea, and sprinkled some in a tin pot, and had the fire going meanwhile, a small one to begin with, the sun was still on us, and stuck a long stick tight down under a few big rocks and made himself something to hang the teapot on and pretty soon the water was boiling and he poured it out steaming into the tin pot and we had cups of tea with our tin cups. I myself'd gotten the water from the stream, which was cold and pure like snow and the crystal-lidded eyes of heaven. Therefore, the tea was by far the most pure and thirst-quenching tea I ever drank in all my life, it made you want to drink more and more, it actually quenched your thirst and of course it swam around hot in your belly...

...Japhy put the bulgur in the pot with water and started it boiling and stirred it around and meanwhile busied himself with the mixings for the chocolate pudding and started boiling that in a separate smaller pot out of my knapsack. He also brewed a fresh pot of tea. Then he whipped out his double set of chopsticks and pretty soon we had our supper ready and laughed over it. It was the most delicious supper of all time. Up out of the orange glow of our fire you could see immense systems of uncountable stars, either as individual blazers, or in low Venus droppers, or vast Milky Ways incommensurate with human understanding, all cold, blue, silver...

-from The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac in the Sierra of Yosemite with Gary Snyder