Quotes About Wilderness

I rise and turn back.... leaving the rest of the world to coyotes who are now running across the mountain together, howling and yipping behind me, calling for the frozen night to come.

This is not wilderness for designation or for a park. Not a scenic wilderness and not one good for fishing or the viewing of wildlife. It is wilderness that gets into your nostrils, that runs with your sweat. It is the core of everything living, wilderness like molten iron.

Mountain lions are psychological animals, preying on the mind with secret eyes. They know that they still dominate, that they cannot be cornered without ripping their way out. They know that they are still the heart of firceness. Being pack animals ourselves, we humans have some alliance with other pack animals, like wolves or coyotes. When I see a free wolf, I feel as if we could sit down and talk, given that the details have been worked out. Not so with the cat. The cat speaks in symbols.

We guard our bodies until they are old and tasteless, when we could have fed ourselves to claw and fur, been literally reincarnated in the cells of a lion sleeping in the sun, the wall of muscle that is a bear crashing through a rotten log in search of ant eggs. Why not return again and again, glistening, gilded every time?

Sidewinder tracks lifted off the dunes and flew around us.

A wind started up. It began scouring our cheeks, and we lifted hands, blocking our faces from a gauze of blowing sand. So much wind came that it was hard to breathe without covering our noses and mouths. We stood and shouldered our packs to keep going. Sidewinder tracks lifted off the dunes and flew around us.

Craig Johnson

As she stood there, she looked to the north where there seemed to be another road, but not really a road, more like a snowplow had suddenly gone rogue and wandered off to die alone and away from the herd.

My brain is a vast, barren, jokeless plain where wolves howl at the moon over rocky overhangs and the wind kicks up twists of sand and tumbleweed.

Someday I'm going to throw you across his back and ride off west with you...and you'll learn to make a coffee in a tin pot over a fire, and we'll sleep underneath a wagon and look out at the stars-

Do you ever wish to quit the daily comedy of transforming into the I-speaker without abandoning the wilderness of sensing? The sensation isn't morbid; it is ultimately disinterested.

I was used to shooting beer cans off the back of an old washing machine, or at things that ran away from me that I intended to eat—not things that ran toward me with the intent of eating me. I'd found that to be a significant difference.

The best times of my life, the times that passed by me the most quickly, were the times when the roses grew wild.

were the times when the roses grew wild.

We have a moral responsibility to save wild places like the arctic refuge for future generations, and that is why our country has remained committed to its protection for nearly 50 years.

Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time.

It bypasses Watt Lake and heads way up into the forest and mountains out the

Coyotes began yipping, their chorus of cries echoing into the distant Marble mountains.

Adirondack Park, a 6-million-acre wilderness area and parkland in the Adirondack Mountains, is larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier, and Olympic national parks combined.

Ever heard a pack of wolves growling in anger? It's less than restful.

The woods can be a bit strange. It takes a long time to feel you belong there and then you never again really belong in town. It's a choice made for you by your brain at a moment you don't notice.

Three hundred yards away, a mule deer that had already browsed its fill and been to water, rested in the shelter of a dry wash. Long-eared jack rabbits went about their various affairs. Gophers ventured a few yards from their dens, then squeaked and scurried back. A heavy-bodied rattlesnake, just emerged from its winter's den, coiled near a clump of cholla cactus and waited for a pack rat to venture from its spiny nest.

The grand highway is crowded with lovers and searchers and leavers so eager to please, and to forget. Wilderness

Lions in the street and roaming Dogs in heat, rabid, foaming A beast caged in the heart of a city The body of his mother Rotting in the summer ground He fled the town He went down South and crossed the border Left the chaos and disorder Back there over his shoulder One morning he awoke in a green hotel With a strange creature groaning beside him Sweat oozed from its shiny skin Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin