John Sandford Quotes

The Yellowstone river is a beautiful river to navigate.

Having made the trip from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean myself going up up up against twenty-five hundred miles of the Missouri River, I can testify that it's one of the most arduous trips that anyone can make on this continent and yet I had a power boat to do it in.

I did a lot of canoe tripping earlier on. I was on 10 trips, and I would get the feel of the forest and the wilderness, you know, that I always knew was in my soul to begin with.

To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same - follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road.

I had a lot of romantic notions about what it would mean to cross Asia by foot.

I want to go base-jumping off Angel Falls and then canoeing down that river that goes east. That's what I really wanna do.

I'd really like to go down the Amazon in some capacity. I've spent time in the Congo, so I love the jungle.

My three-year ride by horse from Mongolia to Hungary was the most difficult, most revealing, and interesting of any of my travels. Travelling by horse, you're far more engaged and dependent on the land and other people than by any other means.

I've always wanted to explore North America. I drive a motorbike and have always wanted to spend a couple of months exploring the continent on two wheels.

I went to Australia and did a three day hike with my fiance through the wilderness, which was nice.

I go to the wild mountains where I am responsible for myself. Step by step I am making sure that I don't die.

There is magic in the feel of a paddle and the movement of a canoe, a magic compounded of distance, adventure, solitude, and peace. The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten. It is an antidote to insecurity, the open door to waterways of ages past and a way of life with profound and abiding satisfactions. When a man is part of his canoe, he is part of all that canoes have ever known.

As a youngster I worked the river boats going down the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, pushing barges to Chicago, then all the way down to New Orleans.

If I had the chance to spend a day with Werner Herzog, I would want there to be a canoe involved. I want to be down in Patagonia or something, and kill some kind of wild beast and skin it and gut it and cook it. And then turn its fur into some kind of layer of warmth. And then trek through the hills.

What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.

You can't replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it.

You don't need a guidebook to see New Orleans - just a good pair of shoes.

At age 22 I set what I insist is an all-time record for distance hitchhiking in Bermuda shorts: 3,700 miles in three weeks.

There was something refreshingly and wildly musical to my ears in the very name of the white man's canoe, reminding me of Charlevoix and Canadian Voyageurs. The batteau is a sort of mongrel between the canoe and the boat, a fur-trader's boat.

All good New Orleanians go to look at the Mississippi at least once a day. At night it is like creeping into a dark bedroom to look at a sleeping child--something of that sort--gives you the same warm nice feeling, I mean.

Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain, And the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again.

I have climbed several higher mountains without guide or path, and have found, as might be expected, that it takes only more time and patience commonly than to travel the smoothest highway.

You could spend your life trying to uncover all the treasures in New Orleans and not even scratch the surface. It's such an amazing place.

You wanna do some livin' before you die. Do it down in New Orleans.

I'm running out of places I can run, looking for a place in the sun.