Hiking Quotes - Page 3

Easier to climb up, than to just hang on.

But all of this success came at the end of a long climb.

Every journey begins with a single step.

The bizarre trend in mountaineers is not the risk they take, but the large degree to which they value life. They are not crazy because they don't dare, they're crazy because they do. These people tend to enjoy life to the fullest, laugh the hardest, travel the most, and work the least.

It was like hiking into a Hemingway story; everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext.

I did get upset once, when we were hiking between pitches 15 and 16. Two women and a dog were trying to find their way down through the maze of trails below the First Summit and they asked us: 'Are you on the trail?' I let my indignity show: 'NO, we're on a CLIMB!'

Walks. The body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird.

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.

Experience comes from bad judgment.

To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

It is a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

The rule of thumb for the old backpacking was that the weight of your pack should equal the weight of yourself and the kitchen range combined. Just a casual glance at the full pack sitting on the floor could give you a double hernia and fuse four vertebrae. After carrying the pack all day, you had to remember to tie one leg to a tree before you dropped it. Otherwise you would float off into space. The pack eliminated the need for any special kind of ground-gripping shoes, because your feet would sink a foot and a half into hard-packed earth, two inches into solid rock.

Going to the mountains is going home.

Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.

If I know I make this much trouble, I never climb Everest.

I was hitchhiking the other day and a hearse stopped. I said, 'No thanks, I'm not going that far.

Some mountaineers are proud of having done all their climbs without bivouac. How much they have missed ! And the same applies to those who enjoy only rock climbing, or only the ice climbs, onyl the ridges or faces. We should refuse none of the thousands and one joys that the mountains offer us at every turn. We should brush nothing aside, set no restrictions. We should experience hunger and thirst, be able to go fast, but also to go slowly and to contemplate.

Another thing I like to do is sit back and take in nature. To look at the birds, listen to their singing, go hiking, camping and jogging and running, walking along the beach, playing games and sometimes being alone with the great outdoors. It's very special to me.

I climb upon the highest mountains, laughing at all tragedies - whether real or imaginary.

Now shall I walk or shall I ride? 'Ride,' Pleasure said; 'Walk,' Joy replied.

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.

Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen

If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are.