Nature, and the original system that created us, must always remain somehow with us, the bedrock of our movements and actions. What is our duty? To live a life.
There are naked people in boots on a mountain top firing guns.
Mountaineers have often observed a lack of clarity in their mental state at high altitudes; it is difficult for the stupid mind to observe how stupid it is.
The English literary movement at the end of the 18th century was obviously due in great part, if not mainly, to the renewed practice of walking.
A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
I want a guy I can go hiking with, who wants to do outdoorsy stuff. It's so much fun to be out in nature and who better to do that with than the person you're dating?
Mountain hikes instilled in me a life-long urge to get to the top of any inviting summit or peak.
Details of the many walks I made along the crest have blurred, now, into a pleasing tapestry of grass and space and sunlight.
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.
Midwest kids got to summer camp. There is something very special about being away from your parents for the first time, sleeping under the stars, hiking and canoeing.
I'd be nervous about skiing, wondering what I'd do if I felt shaky on top of a mountain; but other diabetics do ski, so there's no reason I couldn't.
Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.
That's what I liked about hitch-hiking. If a crowd wasn't big enough, I kept walkin. '
Going down (descending), I realized, was like taking hold of the loose strand of yard on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. 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.
The mountains are calling and I must go.
In no other pursuit is the best or the worst in a man brought out as in mountaineering. An old friend of civilization may be a useless companion on a mountain.
I love Scotland, mainly for its landscape. I like walking, and it's a great place to go hiking.
I know the guru route, I know you go sit on a mountain. But screw India. I ain't going there.
Take nothing for granted. Not one blessed, cool mountain day or one hellish, desert day or one sweaty, stinky, hiking companion. It is all a gift.