Quotes About Wilderness

Kit in the bough of the tree.

The Arctic is the landscape of the self, of the naked soul. It is what the inner landscape looks like when everything beyond the self has been discarded.

And the deep thrumming of the forest that too many people mistake for silence.

Truly, we'll be wolves no longer, but as the tinker said once along ago, we'll survive like the foxes, their children.

I was a very unpredictable child. I'd pack a bag and go off and do a hike in the mountains for 10 days.

I love being immersed in nature, going to places in the world that are pristine and untouched by man. It's almost a religious experience when you go to a place like the Amazon, and there's no civilisation for thousands of miles.

Alaska itself is an unusual state.

No matter how chaotic it is, wildflowers will still spring up in the middle of nowhere.

Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state.

Within sight of Seattle and Vancouver are flanks of the earth that have yet to feel a human footprint.

Beckey's fame spread through word of mouth. There were stories about his wolf howl, a blood-chilling sound, which Beckey would use to scare tourists away from his favorite campsites.

You would think that one of the largest perennial streams in the American Southwest, brought to life by a wilderness holding deep snows in its higher reaches, would be full of life. But the Gila River is all but dead. And so is the forest. Much of it looks devastated. There used to be wolves, grizzly bears, Merriam's elk, beavers, black-footed ferrets, and river otters here. Most of them exist, now, only on the cracked pottery of the long-vanished Mogollon.

Thrill to the names—El Dorado, Searchlight, Medicine Bow, Mesa Verde, Tombstone, Durango, Hole in the Wall, Lost Trail Pass, Nez Perce National Forest. Active names, implying that something consequential is going on: the Wind River Range, the Magic Valley, the River of No Return, the Painted Desert, Wolf Point, Paradise, Death Valley, the Crazy Mountains.

while the number of Cascade hikers has increased sixfold since 1960, nearly a third of the trail mileage has been lost to logging and neglect.

The larger question for the Northwest, where the cities are barely a hundred years old but contain three-fourths of the population, is whether the wild land can provide work for those who need it as their source of income without being ruined for those who need it as their source of sanity.

the Forest Service has punched 343,000 miles of logging roads into the vast stands of public trees—more than seven times the 44,000 miles of road built by the national highway system.

Notice how much Israel's response to hardship maps onto ours. We face hard things and we complain about things as mundane as a menu. Before long, our complaining becomes an assessment of blame. Then the blaming goes vertical as it questions God's wisdom and goodness. We, too, are in the wilderness of a fallen world. We have not yet entered the Promised Land of eternity, so we face hardships like Israel did.

The Bible describes the Christian life as a journey that often takes us through the wilderness. You will get tired and confused. You will have moments when you wonder where God is.

And were you cornered by her, eye to eye, you would see that there are still some watchful creatures whose essence lies unbound by words. There is still a wilderness.

I don't see how anybody could have a passion for nature without having an equally developed tolerance for the cold.

I used to be such a militant city-ist, but more and more I've seen forests and nature and oceans, and I don't know any more if this is the awesomest way to live.

One time, I took a woman on a deserted island, and we lived like Mother Nature for 10 days.

Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.

My sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness can be adapted to almost any occasion, joyful, or, as in the present case, distressing. [All sigh.] I have preached it at harvest celebrations, christenings, confirmations, on days of humiliation and festal days.