Favorite Backcountry/ Adventure Quotes

Tom Listed some great quotes in the emergency thread. I have always love quotes and I'm sure there are many people out there with a few good ones! Here are two of mine

The flowers bloom, the songbirds sing
And though it sun or rain
I walk the mountaintops with spring
From Georgia north to Maine.

-Earl V. Shaffer- 1948
"Walking with Spring"

"If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs.....If we had eggs."

From "Eiger dreams" by John Krakauer

Not sure who originaly said this but it was written in Eiger dreams as a relation to being in a tentbound for a long time durring a storm.

I love quotes too, Jeffrey. Here are some outdoor and nature-minded ones. The first is my favorite:

"There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing."
- Sir Rannulph Fiennes

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
- Confucius

"A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Find your space on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there."
- Gary Snyder

"We can never have enough of Nature."
- Henry David Thoreau

"I rejoice that there are owls."
- Henry David Thoreau (that one's for my 3-year-old who loves owls)

"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."
— John Muir

"A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world."
- Paul Dudley White

“A man does not climb a mountain without bringing some of it away with him, and leaving something of himself upon it."
- Sir Martin Conway

"We don't stop hiking because we grow old, we grow old because we stop hiking."
- Finis Mitchell

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
- Mark Twain

"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig."
Seen on a T-shirt and very appropriate for my friend who was wearing it. He didn't take much BS from anyone.

"Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes in the middle of nowhere, you find yourself."

more of a .... well you see!

"I believe in God, only I spell it N-A-T-U-R-E!"
~Frank Lloyd Wright

"I have good news and bad news....the good news is that our packs are going to be a lot lighter!"

- My husband's friend Steve on a backpacking trip in Yosemite, trying to break it to me gently that a bear had gotten to our food bag and eaten about half of our food. This was more than 20 years ago before bear barrels were readily available, let alone required in places like Yosemite. We had hung our food in a tree with the traditional method using counterweighted bags.

The rest of the story: I repaired the ripped stuff bags with dental floss and duct tape and we continued, glad that I had packed a little more food than we needed. The next night, even though we really tried hard to put up a better bear bag, a bear [same one?] got it down and ate every last scrap of food. It even ripped open the back of a small can of meat spread [it didn't need the pull-top!] and licked it clean. We cut short our trip and hiked to the valley floor. My husband got a ride all the way back to our car by a man who decided that the long ride (over an hour) was a perfect opportunity to proselytize.

I recommend your story to all those people who whine about carrying bear canisters. The park should print it out and hand it out to all the campers. LOL

Alicia-back in the mid 80's I saw Fiennes give a lecture on some epic trip he took-he rode a snowmobile around the world or something strange like that.

favorite outdoor quote? That's easy! "Oooohhh!!!!" - spoken by my eldest daughter upon seeing a sunrise from atop Boundary Peak in the Adirondacks - she was three or four years old.