We [Puritans] have been reputed a Colony of wild Opinionists, swarmed into a remote wilderness to find elbow-room for our fanatic Doctrines and practices.
The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.
True wilderness is where you keep it, and real wilderness experience cannot be a sedentary one; you have to seek it out not seated, but afoot.
From inaccessible mountain range by way of desert untrod by human foot to the ends of the unknown seas, the breath of the everlasting creative spirit is felt, rejoicing over every speck of dust that hearkens to it and lives.
Antarctica has this mythic weight. It resides in the collective unconscious of so many people, and it makes this huge impact, just like outer space. It's like going to the moon.
From the sentimental point of view, it is the last great Polar journey that can be made.
The jarring change going from an urban environment to an extremely remote natural environment is extremely inspiring. It's constantly stimulating, it's like a slap in the face.
The literature of the emperor penguin is as forbidding, as inaccessible, as the frozen heart of Antarctica itself. Its beauties may be unearthly, but they are not for us.
I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.
Out here where the world begins and ends, it’s like nothing ever stops happening.
Anyone who has chanced like me to roam through desolate mountains and studied at length their fantastic shapes and drunk the invigorating air of their valleys can understand why I wish to describe and depict these magic scenes for others.
Wilderness and motors are incompatible and the former can best be experienced, understood and enjoyed when the machines are left behind where they belong -- on the superhighways and in the parking lots, on the reservoirs and in the marinas.
Being lost in Australia gives you a lovely feeling of security.
Only the desert has a fascination--to ride alone--in the sun in the forever unpossessed country--away from man. That is a great temptation.
I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.
There's a huge expanse of this continent that so seldom gets photographed.
All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God.
A mountain with a wolf on it stands a little taller.
I have a number of places on my wish list, including Antarctica, the Norwegian fjords, and the Amazon. I have a passion for wilderness, and Siberia is on my list - however, that may be a bridge too far.
It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.
There are few places in my life that I've found more ruggedly beautiful than the Highlands of Scotland. The place is magical - it's so far north, so remote, that sometimes it feels like you've left this world and gone to another.
When corruption is visited upon the cities of men, the mountains and the deserts await him. The cities are for money but the high-up hills are purely for the soul.
Nowhere, not at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains.
In Kazahkstan, you would drive five hours outside the city to where roads sort of stop being roads, and it was just in the mountains and deathly quiet. And you could only really hear the clumping of the horses, and it was a sort of a beautiful silence. Like it enveloped you.
I remember little of the Yukon or what I wrote there.
