the journey
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you - beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
-Edward Abbey
the adventure
"It was good to be back in the wilderness again,
where everything seems at peace. I was alone... just me and the animals. It was a great feeling -- free once more to plan and do as I pleased. Beyond was all around me. My dream was a dream no longer. I suppose I was here because this was something I had to do. Not just dream about it, but do it. I suppose, too, I was here to test myself. Not that I had never done it before, but this time it was to be a more thorough and lasting examination."
-Dick Proenneke
YOUR KIND WORDS