I do a lot of running and hiking, and I also collect stamps - space stamps and Olympics stamps.
Climbing is one of the few sports in which the arena (the cliffs, the mountains and their specific routes) acquire a notoriety that outpopulates, outshines and outlives the actual athletes.
It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.
Many climbers become writers because of the misconceptions about climbing.
The wilderness is a place of rest - not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance.
Getting outdoors is always fun. In the summertime, I like to go waterskiing and swimming; during the winter, I'll sometimes go jogging or hiking.
I've always had bad posture, and Pilates makes me feel taller and reminds me to keep my shoulders back. And hiking isn't just about doing cardio, it's also when I can get my 'me time' to be alone with my thoughts. After Pilates I should do some cardio, and after hiking, I need to do some resistance training.
Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.
The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
The mountain music. . . is compelling music in its own right, harking back to a time when music was a part of everyday life and not something performed by celebrities.
The longest journey begins with a single step, not with a turn of the ignition key.
Doubly happy, however, is the man to whom lofty mountain tops are within reach.
It's only a hitch when you're in a slump. When you're hitting the ball its called rhythm.
Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.
Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost
In its outward manifestation, meditation appears to involve either stopping, by parking the body in a stillness that suspends activity, or giving oneself over to flowing movement. In either case, it is an embodiment of wise attention, an inward gesture undertaken for the most part in silence, a shift from doing to simply being. It is an act that may at first seem artificial but that we soon discover, if we keep at it, is ultimately one of pure love for the life unfolding within us and around us.
There is a life-force within your soul, seek that life. There is a gem in the mountain of your body, seek that mine. O traveller, if you are in search of that Don't look outside, look inside yourself and seek that.
That was another incredible thing: the opportunity to be in Greenland, a place I had read about in NatGeo a decade before. Suddenly I was staying there and hiking there, and we took a mini iceberg out of the water and chipped it up and used it as ice cubes and made cocktails with it. It's surreal.
It was like hiking into a Hemingway story; everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext.
Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.