Best 367 quotes in «hiking quotes» category

Vice President Cheney is also on vacation. He's in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. What better place for a guy who has had 4 heart attacks than a place with thin air, rugged hiking and all-beef dinners? Why don't they get some snow for him to shovel while he's out there, too?

Walking I am unbound, and find that precious unity of life and imagination, that silent outgoing self, which is so easy to loose, but which a high moments seems to start up again from the deepest rhythms of my own body. How often have I had this longing for an infinite walk - of going unimpeded, until the movement of my body as I walk fell into the flight of streets under my feet - until I in my body and the world in its skin of earth were blended into a single act of knowing.

Walking is the number one exercise for your feet as well as your body. Barefoot walking is the ideal.

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature's darlings.

Walking is also an ambulation of mind.

Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.

Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.

Walking takes longer... than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed.

Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.

We are all vegetarians here, and except for a mountain lion that's been hanging around and killed our dog, we don't have a care in the world.

We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.

We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, and trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails; all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth!

We are taught to consume. And that's what we do. But if we realized that there really is no reason to consume, that it's just a mind set, that it's just an addiction, then we wouldn't be out there stepping on people's hands climbing the corporate ladder of success.

What really helps motivate me to walk are my dogs, who are my best pals. They keep you honest about walking because when it's time to go, you can't disappoint those little faces.

We didn't know if the rover could climb up or down the hills of the crater.

Well, I was born and raised in the Midwest, in Indiana specifically, and my childhood was full of weekend movies, you know, the Saturday and Sunday popcorn movies.

Were we, also, hiking along some cosmic journal page? Were the events about us all part of a message we could understand, if only we found the right perspective from which to read them? Somehow, with our long series of miracles, I thought so.

We must walk before we run.

You take that walk from the dressing room to the ring and that's when the real man comes out. Then you climb up those four stairs and into the ring. Then finally, you can't wait for the bell to ring.

What you're missing is that the path itself changes you.

When I was hitch-hiking, people had to follow me, 'cause I didn't stay long.

When my neighbor walks the dogs, he performs a ritual act of sacer simplicitas, to use the church Latin: "sacred simplicity." Walking the dog is in truth a ritual of renewal and revival on an intimate scale - a small rebirth of well-being on a daily basis.

When the path ignites a soul, there's no remaining in place. The foot touches ground, but not for long.

When you have worn out yourshoes, the strength of the shoe leather has passed into the fiber ofyour body. I measure your health by the number of shoes and hats andclothes you have worn out.

With the first step, the number of shapes the walk might take is infinite, but then the walk begins to define itself as it goes along, though freedom remains total with each step: any tempting side road can be turned into an impulse, or any wild patch of woods can be explored. The pattern of the walk is to come true, is to be recognized, discovered.

When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

You can feel as brave as Columbus starting for the unknown the first time you enter a Chinese lane full of boys laughing at you, or when you risk climbing down in a Tibetan pub for a meal of rotten meat.

After all this time questioning whether I could trust myself, my instinct had proven right — I’d found a path in pathless woods.

April is the cruelest month.' So begins T.S. Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece, a 434-line poem titled 'The Waste Land.' Until my employment as a trail maintenance worker, this had simply been a line on a page, albeit a line fraught with metaphorical import and potential. Now I saw it for what it was—a big fat lie—because Eliot grew up in St. Louis and no one forgets what a Missouri summer is like. If the Nobel laureate had been truthful with himself, the opening verse would start out, 'June’s a bitch.

After more than two thousand miles on the [Appalachian] trail, you can expect to undergo some personality changes. A heightened affinity for nature infiltrates your life. Greater inner peace. Enhanced self-esteem. A quiet confidence that if I could do that, I can do and should do whatever I really want to do. More appreciation for what you have and less desire to acquire what you don’t. A childlike zest for living life to the fullest. A refusal to be embarrassed about having fun. A renewed faith in the essential goodness of humankind. And a determination to repay others for the many kindnesses you have received.

All I could think as he was speaking was that, if he touched me at all, all the miles I’d walked, the pain I’d felt, the beauty I’d drunken like milk, like good wine making me happy, the four million steps I’d taken, would all add up to nothing. They’d be stolen. They’d vanish like the teeth children lose when they get hit. Only after the blood was washed away would I see that they were gone.

As soon as the first piece of foliage came within blade’s reach, my student started frantically swinging the machete like he was defending his virtue from a trove of drunken, handsy woodland elves. 'I feel like I’m in the movie Predator,' he said as he decapitated a flower.

As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go. The bull, I acknowledged grimly, could be in either direction, since I hadn’t seen where he’d run once I closed my eyes. I could only choose between the bull that would take me back and the bull that would take me forward. And so I walked on.

At one time areas along the roadways [in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park] were carefully cut and trimmed, creating a lawnlike appearance. When a new superintendent was appointed, he ordered this practice stopped, which engendered a good deal of complain from visitors. The roadsides had been so attractive, they said, so neat, and now they had a rough and ungainly appearance. On this small but significant point the superintendent was adamant, however, and for exactly the right reason. Visitors to the park were reacting to a conventional, familiar, and deeply ingrained image of beauty - the trimmed and landscaped lawn. The goal should not be to stimulate that familiar response, but to confront the visitor with the less familiar setting of an unmanaged landscape. The mild shock of a scene to which there is no patterned response, and the engendering of an untutored personal response, is precisely what national park management should seek, even in such seemingly small details.

At least Ozymandias had a statue erected in his name. If I were to have died at that moment, the only thing I had managed to erect in my honor was a shrine to China’s manufacturing capabilities.

Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone. Childhood is a wilderness.

At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing it was absurd and pointless and ridiculously difficult and far more than I expected doing it would be and I was profoundly unprepared to do it.

Feeling LOW? Go on mountains.

Divljina je ta originalnost. U njoj čovjek otkriva najprije sebe i svoja ograničenja, potom okolinu i njenu povezanost s transcendencijom, a najzadnje svoje mjesto u toj okolini. Nalazeći svoje mjesto u okolini čovjek se okreće smislu. Divljina je mjesto vraćanja onamo gdje je sve počelo, kako je bilo osmišljeno prije ljudske intervencije. Divljina je jeka postanka. U njoj osluškujemo originalnu Stvoriteljevu zamisao, ne samo o nama samima, već i o cijelom svemiru.

Do you know how fast you are walking? ... To get a close estimate, count the number of steps you take in a minute and divide by 30... :)

Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average, the total walking of an American these days - that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls - adds up to 1.4 miles a week...That's ridiculous.

Few things in this world evoke scrotum-shriveling fear in a man like a group of frowning women, enraged to the point of atypical silence, ambling toward him with an obvious agenda.

Childhood is a wilderness.

Children believe they are immortal, death is an empty word like the name of a country they’ve never been to on a time-faded map. I wasn’t a child anymore.

Come with me to the mountains. Every rock there tells a story.

For all my life, I had been passive when faced with dangers. I was stunned as I swam to find that I had, for the first time in my history, asserted myself and been truly heard—respected. It felt monumental, I was buzzing with adrenaline. It was as if I’d become someone else entirely. I had escaped a kidnapper. It finally felt real. My body unclenched tension in the balmy pool. I was proud of the strength I’d found. I was the one who asserted he take me back; I caused him to listen. I was no longer a passive Doll Girl, trapped. This was me learning I could trust my voice—I’d used it, and it finally worked! I was triumphant. This escape showed me: I had grown, and grown vividly.

Hiking and happiness go hand in hand (or foot in boot).

Going barefoot in the forest is a very sensuous and a pleasurable experience. For some of us it is almost a mystical experience. I know that I dreamt of it long before I ever durst try it. It is also an experience that brings into question our entire relationship with nature in a way that disturbs and challenges our ideas about ourselves as civilized beings.