We are the wilderness withinScreaming out for true expression.Even when we’re sleeping,There’s no escape from this obsession.

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our...

At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts...

Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex...

I watched the surrounding landscape with great curiosity, and I wanted to discover the words that could describe all its unspoiled beauty.

Have faith my friends, because love will find you eventually. It found me, and I was wearing camouflage clothing, face paint, and cologne that smelled like the wilderness.

Among wilderness survival tips, punching a wild animal in the face probably isn’t on a checklist.

If you reconnect with nature and the wilderness you will not only find the meaning of life, but you will experience what it means to be truly alive.

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...

I walked slowly to enjoy this freedom, and when I came out of the mountains, I saw the sky over the prairie, and I thought that if heaven was real, I hoped it was a...

Since well before the Kung’s engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not a language like Russian or Chinese but it is a...

I didn’t say a word. He wouldn’t be using oxygen. K2 is more dangerous than Everest.

A flower’s structure leads a bee toward having pollen adhere to its body . . . we don’t know of any such reason why beautiful places attract humans.

Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its...

Our incredible bewilderment (wilderness separation) blinds us from seeing that our many personal and global problems primarily result from our assault of and separation from the natural creation process within and around us. Our estrangement...

I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.

As the saturating colors of sun-life fade from sight, the ominous moon reaches out its long arm and applies the dark dyes of night.

The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself.

We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.

The old school of thought would have you believe that you’d be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn’t...

Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness.

Today I am an unemployed writer living as a recluse in the great Northwoods.

The writer Richard Manning has argued that ‘the most destructive force in the American West is its commanding views, because they foster the illusion that we command.

Forgiveness is alchemy of the soul in which the feeling of possibility returns to the human spirit.

There seems to be no way to save wildness from human intrusion without establishing and enforcing rules and regulations that are themselves intrusions on what, by definition, are meant to be areas outside humanity’s control.

The moment her hymen was plucked from her body in the wilderness, Her soul was taken from sanity.

To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

My hands are flowing like sunlight. The shapes and colors are astounding. I don’t understand these images that are empowering me. My brush touches the canvas like photons to the earth, and a new world...

Life in the wild, as I’m observing, is about survival as much as pleasure.

Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever...

One who will not accept solitude, stillness and quiet recurring moments…is caught up in the wilderness of addictions; far removed from an original state of being and awareness. This is ‘dis-ease.

Unlike the majority of people, he did not hate or fear the wilderness; as harsh as the empty lands were, they possessed a grace and a beauty that no artifice could compete with and that...

When I returned to camp, they walked behind me on the trail, and we spoke not a word about getting skunked today, but rather talked about the days we returned with a stringer full of...