Quotes About Wilderness

It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.

I would look out upon the wildflowers, the mulch of swamps and leaves, the spring mosses greening on the rocks, or the boulderous mountains of street-black snow, whatever season it happened to be- my mittens clotted with ice, or my hands grimy with marsh mud- and from the back of my larynx I'd send part of my voice out toward the horizon and part of it straight up toward the sky. There must have been some pain in me. I wanted to howl and fly and break apart.

Hardy had learned in a hard school, where the tests are given by savage Indians, by bitter cold, by hunger. These were tests where the result was not just a bad mark if one failed. The result was a starved or frozen body somewhere, forgotten in the wilderness.

Not that folks disliked me or that I ever went around being mean, but folks never did get close to me and it was most likely my fault. There was always something standoffish about me. I liked folks, but I liked the wild animals, the lonely trails, and the mountains better.

To my way of thinking there was nothing finer than to top out on a lonely ridge and sit in my saddle with the wind bringing the smell of pines up from the valley below and the sun glinting off the snow of distant peaks. There was an urge to drink from all the hidden springs, catch fish in the lonely creeks, and leave my tracks on all that far, beautiful country.

We Sackett boys never killed anything we didn't need to eat unless it was coming at us. A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.

Thunder rolled like a distant avalanche in the mountain valleys.…

Them Injuns. Takin' the country off 'em. In good times it must've been a fine life they had, huntin' and fishin' or driftin' down the country on the trail of the buffalo. I ain't sure what we'll do to the country will be any better.

There are folks who can't abide camp-robber jays, but I take to them. Often enough they've been my only company for days at a time, and they surely do get friendly. They'll steal your grub right from under your nose, but who I am to criticize the lifestyle of a bird? He has his ways, I have mine. Like I say, I take to them.

The trees are aware, and the bushes. The birds and small animals are aware, and they listen, hesitant, suspecting. Awareness of danger is an element of their being. It is like their breathing, like the blood in their veins, and one who lives much with the wilderness become so aware, too... Half of woodcraft is attention, and all of survival.

Raindrops felt his cheeks with blind, questing fingers...the black trunks of the trees were like iron bars against the gray of gathering pools. Radigan

Bats and birds taken from those mountains

It was a sea of horns above the red, brown, brindle, and white-splashed backs of the steers.

You will leave here at daybreak and you will leave alone. He smiled, showing a fine set of white, even teeth. And if I do not choose to? Bodies do not lie long upon the ground. The coyotes dispose of them.

Louis L'Amour

Deadwood Gulch, a scattered, loosely knit series of communities, some of them hidden away in small hollows or scattered in other ravines connecting with this. White Rocks

Most of all we needed a fat bear, for of all things, fat is the hardest to come by in the wilderness.

Louis L'Amour

tawny-headed man

The old towns, the ghost towns, no longer belong to men. The desert and the mountains have taken them back, gathered them into their arms and made them one with the trees and brush and rocks.

spring and enough grass to last the burros for quite some time. After a careful scouting around, he made a fire of dead mesquite, which made almost no smoke, and fixed some coffee. When he had eaten, Dunbar gathered up his pan, pick, shovel, and rifle and moved out. He was

To a wandering man in the wilderness a back trail must be as important as that ahead, for it might be the direction taken tomorrow, and when one faced around the trail looked far, far different. Gigantic boulders seen from one direction might be low, flat rocks seen from another . . . all things were different. Studying trails had taught him much about life, that much depends on the viewpoint.

Louis L'Amour

Louis L'Amour