Words power the mind and create an experience for the reader. When reading these quotations, our interpretations may differ from the experiences to which the authors refer. Yet, something drives us to reflect upon and reminisce about backcountry days for some inspiration and perspective on current endeavors. Whether sharing these quotations with Scouts, or spending time
with friends at college trying to explain Philmont--the ensations and emotions will come to life and a feeling can be shared. A feeling can open up the minds of friends and let them share something of the mountains we call home.
``Wilderness,'' as a word, means the place where wild deer abound, and thankfully, they are still browsing the Philmont country in abundance. By sharing wilderness quotes and experiences, we might create a desire
in others to preserve some precious moments for the next generation of
Philmont campers.
There's something in the human spirit that reawakens, that flares and
sparks in these hills and mesas of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. But
something of this sense of adventure can slink away from the most stout-hearted
of men and women back in the city, eating out of plastic bowls at a fast
food village or trying to pick out the stars of Orion's belt through the
hazy neon of a Raton strip.
Possibly some of what's here may make Orion a little brighter. Share
the wilderness--it's been the Philmont way for 44 years.
Susie Dobbs, Laura Lampe, & Ed Ohnemus
Philmont Scout Ranch, 1985
These properties are donated and dedicated to the
Boy Scouts of America for the purpose of perpetuating faith -- self reliance
-- integrity -- freedom. Principles used to build this great country by
the American pioneer so that these future citizens may through thoughtful
adult guidance and by the inspiration of nature visualize and form a code
of living to diligently maintain these high ideals and our proper destiny.
--Waite Phillips, December 31, 1941
Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.
--Richard Bach, from Illusions
So much for me here. . .
Peace, air, sunlight, rain.
Happiness, discovery, lows & highs.
It's like a puzzle that fits together
perfectly, yet its parts are interchangeable
--Julie Fine
The best informed people are those with acute observation and who are
inquisitive to be continually asking ``Why?''
--Waite Phillips
No person is entirely bad or entirely good. Therefore learn to forgive
yourself for error the same as you should forgive others.
--Waite Phillips
And forget not that the earth delights to
feel your bare feet and the winds long to
play with your hair.
--Kahlil Gibran..
The words ``perseverance'' and stubbornness'' are not synonymous but
it is distressing to observe that many people do not recognize the difference.
--Waite Phillips
No one should boast of being honest, dependable, courteous, and considerate
for those are fundamental qualities essential to good character that everyone
ought to develop and use.
--Waite Phillips
In the soft evenings of June, the rosy summits.
Above the lateral where the tree line crosses
Are like faces lifted up in serene torture,
Spilling blood of beauty over the foothills,
Of pinon and red juniper, each tree in itself,
A crucifix for the stretched--out soul.
--Phillips Kloss, Sangre de Cristo Mountains
Red exhaustion rips at your throat. And salt sweat
spills off your forehead and mats your eyelids and brows. And drips on
the burning ground. And your legs start to turn to rubber and collapse
like a balloon. ``Pretty soon I've got to rest. How much farther? What's
the good of this God damned work anyway?'' The long distance runner is
paid by the snap of a white thread across his chest. You are paid by the
picture at your feet.
--Terry and Renny Russell
So rests the sky against the earth. The dark still
tarn in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife's body in
faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still,
high, light of the morning.
I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and
absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water,
sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil,
the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No,
no, no -- but refreshed, rested -- while waiting.
--Dag Hammarskjold..
Happy is the man who loves the woods and waters,
Brother to the grass and well--beloved of Pan;
The earth shall be his, and all her laughing daughters----
Happy the man.
His gossips are the stars, and the moon his tavern;
He who seeks a better find it if he can --
And O his sweet pillow in the ferny cavern!
Happy the man.
--Richard le Galliene, Beatus Vir
A human being should be able to heal a wound, plan an expedition, order
from a French menu, climb a mountain face, enjoy a ballet, balance accounts,
roll a kayak, embolden a friend, tell a joke, laugh at himself, cooperate,
act alone, sing a children's song, solve equations, throw a dog a stick,
pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, love heartily, fight
efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
--Lew Hitchner
I wonder if the mountains still stand when I turn my head or do they
dip their peaks and nod at my retreating back.
You can feel the muscle knots tightening in your legs. And now and
then you reach down to test the hard lumpiness. The passes get easier and
finally you're just laughing over them. Every step and strain and hard
breath and heart pump is an investment in tomorrow morning's strength.
You're watching the change with your own eyes and feeling if under your
skin and through your own veins. Fibers multiply and valves enlarge and
walls thicken. A miracle. At least if the species has lost its animal strength
its individual members can have the fun of finding it again.
--Terry and Renny Russell
There is a brook in the mountains,
Nobody I ask knows its name.
It shines on the earth like a piece
Of the sky. It falls away
In waterfalls, with a sound
Like rain. It twists between rocks
And makes deep pools. It divides
Into islands. It flows through
Calm reaches. It goes its way
With no one to mind it. The years
Go by, it's clear depths never change.
--Ch' u Ch'uang I..
Must we always teach our children with books? Let
them look at the stars and the mountains above. Let them look at the waters
and the trees and flowers on Earth. Then they will begin to think, and
to think is the beginning of a real education.
--David Polis
Patience is the Companion of Wisdom.
--St. Augustine
You can not stay on the summit forever.
You have to come down anyway.
So why bother in the first place?
Just this:
What is above knows what is below.
But what is below does not know what if above.
One climbs, one sees, one descends. One sees no longer,
but one has seen.
--Terry and Renny Russell
I settled at Cold Mountain long ago,
Already it seems like years and years.
Freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams
And linger watching things themselves.
Men don't get this far into the mountains,
White clouds gather and billow.
Thin grass does for a mattress,
The blue sky makes a good quilt.
Happy with a stone underhead
Let heaven and earth go about their changes.
--Gary Snyder..
All paths lead nowhere, so it is important to choose a path that has
heart.
--Carlos Castenda
No servant brought them meals: they got their meat out of the river,
or went without. No traffic cop whistled them off the hidden rock in the
next rapids. No friendly roof kept them dry when they mis-guessed whether
or not to pitch the tent. No guide showed them which camping spots offered
a nightlong breeze, and which a nightlong misery of mosquitoes; which firewood
made clean coals, and which only smoke. . .The elemental simplicities of
wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because
they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave
them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish
acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has
built a thousand buffers. These boys were ``on their own'' in this particular
sense.
--Aldo Leopold, from Sand County Almanac
``I think,'' said Christopher Robin, ``that we ought
to eat all our provisions now so we shan't have to carry them.''
--A.A. Milne
You cannot learn to fly by flying. First you must learn to walk, and
to run, and to climb, and to dance.
--Nietzsche
About mountains it is useless to argue, you have either been up or you haven't. The view from halfway is nobody's view. The Best flowers are on top under a ledge, nourished by the wind. A sense of smell is of less importance than a sense of balance, walking on clouds through holes in which you can see the earth ---- the wind has its own level to find.
To the attentive eye, each movement of the year has it's own beauty,
and in the fame field it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never
seen before and which shall never be seen again.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
The greatest wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, from a conversation with John Muir
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ``twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.
I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.
I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him they knew----
Only more sure of all I thought was true.
--Robert Frost, Into My Own
Natural wilderness is a factor for world stability -- an active agent
in maintaining a habitable world.
--Sir Frank Fraser Darling
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.
Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could
not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly
we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.
I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to
the pond--side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it
is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen
into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft
and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind
travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how
deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin
passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world,
for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish
to go below now.
--Henry David Thoreau..
Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,
The world of the flower, the whole of
the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower, the truth
of the blossom:
The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.
--Zenkei Shibayama..
Do not stand by my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow
I am a diamond glint on snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain
When you wake in the morning hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight
I am the soft starshine at night
Do not stand by my grave and cry
I am not there . . . I did not die
-unknown
Live as to die tomorrow. Learn as to live forever.
--Isadore of Seville
The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection
of his own face. Frown at it, and it will look sourly upon; laugh at it
and with it, and it is a jolly, kind companion.
--William Makepeace Thackeray
Expose yourself to the possibility of doing something remarkable.
--C. Cunningham
In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible
summer
--Albert Camus
When I go quiet I stop hearing myself and start hearing the world outside
me. Then, I hear something very great.
--anon
We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
--Tombstone, epitaph of two amateur astronomers
Awareness is becoming acquainted with environment,
no matter where one happens to be. Man does not suddenly become aware or
infused with wonder; it is something we are born with. No child need be
told its secret; he keeps it until the influence of gadgetry and the indifference
of teen--age satiation extinguish its intuitive joy.
--Sigurd Olson..
Ecological sanity and social justice are like two
faces of the same coin -- they are inseparable.
--Jose Lutzenberger
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen--ground--swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending--time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again,
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make the balance:
''Stay where you are until my back is turned!''
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ``Good fences make good neighbors.''
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
''Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I build a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And who I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down,'' I could say ``Elves'' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old--stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go beyond his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ``Good fences make good neighbors.''
--Robert Frost, Mending Wall
At the end of the open road we come to ourselves.
--Louis Simpson
The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.
--Blaise Pascal
Sea waves are green and wet,
But up from where they die
Rise others vaster yet,
And those are brown and dry.
They are the sea made land
To come at the fisher town
And bury in solid sand
The men she could not drown.
She may know cove and cape,
But she does not know mankind
If by any change of shape
She hopes to cut off mind.
Men left her a ship to sink:
They can leave her a hut as well;
And be but more free to think
For the one more cast--off shell.
--Robert Frost, Sand Dunes
I remember streams and lakes
clear and alive with life,
shores of sand moist and clean,
woodlands dense, birds that sang,
leaves that crunched beneath my
tread.
I remember sunshine so bright and
warm
And air so pure you wanted to take great gulps of
it in.
I remember . . .
And a tear runs down my cheek
for you,
My bright young face,
My bright young friend.
And I sorrow that you will never
see
What I remember
--Unknown, I Remember
The old people came literally to love the soil and
they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering
power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked
to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth.
Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth.
The birds that flew into the air came to rest upon the earth and it was
the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was
soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing.
--Chief Luther Standing Bear..
To look at any thing,
If you would know that thing,
You must look at it long:
To look at this green and say
''I have seen spring in these
woods; will not do -- you must
Be the thing you see:
You must be the dark snakes of
Stems and ferny plumes of leaves,
You must enter in
To the small silences between
The leaves,
You must take your time
And touch the very peace
They issue from.
--John Moffitt..
Something will have gone out of us as a people if
we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last
virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases;
if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or
to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean
streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence so that
never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise,
the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never
again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical
and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks
and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent
to belong in it.
We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never
do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
--Wallace Steger
Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never by young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
The disquieting thing in the modern picture is the trophy--hunter who never grows up, in whom the capacity for isolation, perception, and husbandry is undeveloped, or perhaps lost . . .
To enjoy he must possess, invade, appropriate. Hence the wilderness that he cannot personally see has no value to him. Hence the universal assumption that an unused hinterland is rendering no service to society. Those devoid of imagination, a blank spot on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part. (Is my share in Alaska worthless to me because I shall never go there? Do I need a road to show me the arctic prairies, the goose pastures of the Yukon, the Kodiak bear, the sheep meadows behind McKinley?)
It would appear, in short, that the rudimentary grades of outdoor recreation consume their resource base; the higher grades, at least to a degree, create their own satisfaction with little or no attrition of land or life . . . Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
--Aldo Leopold
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or were the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs, and comes short again and again -- who knows the great enthusiasms the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and at worst, if he fails, at least fails so greatly so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.
--Theodore Roosevelt
I expect to pass this way but once; any good therefore that I can do , or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature. Let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
--Etienne Griellet
There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the Gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.
If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
They say: ``Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make.''
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.
And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.
He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha. He is the one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
He's a man who won't fit in.
--Robert Service, The Men That Don't Fit In
Now I see the secret of making the best person, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth
--Walt Whitman
The best way out is always through.
--Robert Frost
A man can fail many times but he isn't a total failure until he begins to blame someone else for his own deficiencies.
We should all realize that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation, every position a duty, and that the most effective sermon is expressed in deeds instead of words.
Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful.
To become competent in governing others we must first learn to govern ourselves.
The trouble with many of us is that we would rather be ruined by flattery and praise than saved by honest criticism.
--Waite Phillips, from Waite Phillip's Epigrams
Nothing worthwhile was ever accomplished without the will to start, the enthusiasm to continue and, regardless of temporary obstacles, the persistence to complete.
--Waite Phillips, from Waite Phillip's Epigrams
To see is one of God's great gifts to man and to comprehend what we see is doubly so. Furthermore, He has endowed some people with the qualities to see the beauties of life and nature much more than others and they have the greatest gift of all.
--Waite Phillips, from Waite Phillip's Epigrams
Once in a while you find a place on earth that becomes your very own. A place undefined. Waiting for you to bring your color, your self. A place untouched, unspoiled, undeveloped. Raw, honest, and haunting. No one, nothing is telling you how to feel or who to be. Let the mountains have you for a day. . .
--Sundance
As for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good--natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by an unseen and unaccountable old joker . . . There is nothing like the perils of the wilderness to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy.
--Herman Melville
Your equipment stands between you and the wilderness. The less of it you have the closer you approach the wilderness. . . Expensive space--age technology makes backpacking easier, or at least more efficient, but it is not what backpacking is all about, merely a means to it. Do only what you have to do.
--Ed Burgen, Vagabonding in the USA
Somehow I can't believe there are many heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secret can be summarized in four Cs. They are curiosity, confidence, courage and constancy, and the greatest of these is confidence. When you believe a thing, believe it all the way. Have confidence in your ability to do it right. And work hard to do the best possible job.
--Walt Disney
Some think that happiness comes from getting, others know that it comes from giving.
--Baden Powell
Today the ``open road'' is a six lane highway, defaced with billboards and beer cans. Open space is vanishing, but our need for freedom to breathe pure air, to climb rocky trails and to observe the tiniest creature persists. From a sleeping bag on the high open ground, you get a fresh view of the world.
Where there seems no way to go, go anyway. Don't be put off by what you can't see. Get up any which way -- scramble on hands and knees, ditching your pride, slide along your bottom for a stretch, clutch at roots, but keep going on. Once there you can look back to the pathway you have cleared, that will make it easier next time you climb.
Climb often not just for the music, but for the in between. The lights and the darks, the patterns of touch make it a ritual -- a tradition by now, and yet you can never duplicate the climb; everytime is the first time.
--Eve Merrian
A New ``Pledge of Allegiance''
''I pledge devotion to the earth, our one and only home,
and to the life this earth sustains;
one nation, one spirit indivisible,
with freedom and fulfillment for all.
--Bruce Hagen, Petaluma, CA 1983