Quotes About Adventure

Oregon. Oregon. Oregon.

What is hiking but walking, after all ?

Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.O

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild.

How wild it is, to let it be.

I looked north, in its direction—the very thought of that bridge a beacon to me. I looked south, to where I'd been, to the wild land that had schooled and scorched me, and considered my options. There was only one, I knew. There was always only one. To keep walking.

I'd been on the PCT for a little more than a month. It seemed like a long time and also it seemed like my trip had just begun, like I was only now digging into whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the woman with the hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller.

open with my knife. Inside, carefully wrapped

He was the first person I'd met who was doing essentially what I was doing, though he was hiking much farther. He didn't need me to explain what I was doing out here. He understood.

But a woman who walks alone in the wilderness for eleven hundred miles? I'd never been anything like that before. I had nothing to lose by giving it a whirl.

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets.

I walked through the spiderwebs, feeling them like magic on my face.

I was lost but I was not afraid,

Basking in the attention of the people who gathered around me, I didn't just feel like a backpacking expert. I felt like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen.

I'd made a plan: I would follow this road wherever it led me. I'd ignore all the others that crossed its path, no matter how intriguing or promising they looked.

I'd loved books in my regular, pre- PCT life, but on the trail, they'd taken on even greater meaning. They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.

How strange and glorious it was to be anchored to nothing, to be free, in some particular way, for the first time in my life.

Put yourself in the way of beauty.

I continued up, into the late afternoon and evening, unable to see anything except what was immediately before me. I wasn't thinking of snakes, as l'd been the day before. I wasn't thinking. I'm hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail. I wasn't even thinking, What have I gotten myself into? I was thinking only of moving myself forward.

Testing yourself means relinquishing the things you believe have so far kept you safe or comfortable

Cheryl Strayed

You don't need a reason to leave.

Not regretting it later is the reason I've done at least three-quarters of the best things in my life.

We're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.