At dawn with staff in hand I climbed the crags, At dusk I made my camp among the mountains. Only a few peaks rise as high as this house, Facing crags, it overlooks winding streams. In front of its gates a vast forest stretches, While boulders lie around its very steps. Hemmed in by mountains, there seems no way out, The track gets lost among the thick bamboos. My visitors can never find their way, And when they leave, forget the path they took. The raging torrents rush on through the dusk, The monkeys clamour shrilly in the night. Deep in meditation, how can I part from the Truth? I cherish the Way and never will swerve from it. My heart is one with the trees of late autumn, My eyes delight in the buds of early spring. I dwell with my constant companions and wait for my end, Content to find peace through accepting the flux of things. I only regret that there is no kindred soul, To climb with me this ladder to the clouds in the blue
(early fifth century)
I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
At daybreak, I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded. Expanses unknown to deed or map are known to every dawn, and solitude, supposed no longer to exist in my county, extends on every hand as far as the dew can reach.
The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers but as fountain of life.
The heights by great men reached and kept, Were not attained by sudden flight. But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.
A people who climb the ridges and sleep under the stars in high mountain meadows, who enter the forest and scale the peaks, who explore glaciers and walk ridges buried deep in snow -- these people will give their country some of the indomitable spirit of the mountains.
We can keep our freedom through the increasing crises of history only if we are self-reliant enough to be free. We cannot become self-reliant if our dominant desire is to be safe and secure; under that influence we could never face and overcome the adversities of this competitive age. We will be self-reliant only if we have a real appetite for independence.
Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there's nothing else to gaze on, Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore, Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon, Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar? Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it, Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost? Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God's sake go and do it; Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.
Climbing K-2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube: There are some things one would rather have done than do.
You can't belay a man who's falling in love.
Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.
The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and I, until only the mountain remains.
There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon which I have not dared to dwell; and with these in mind I say, Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste, look well to each step, and from the beginning think what may be the end.
Though sluggards deem it but a foolish chase, And marvel men should quit their easy chair, The toilsome way, and long, long league to trace, Oh! there is sweetness in the mountain air, And Life, that bloated Ease can never hope to share
"Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," Lord Byron