Pacific Crest Trail Quotes

Humans pull together in an odd way when they're in the wilderness. It's astonishing how few people litter and how much they help one another. Indeed, the smartphone app to navigate the Pacific Crest Trail, Halfmile, is a labor of love by hikers who make it available as a free download. ~ Nicholas Kristof

There are moments in our lives - eras in our lives - when self-care demands more. When you're actually suffering an enormous loss or reeling, the best thing you can do is step outside of the pressure cookers of your life. One of the things I did in my own life when I found myself at that kind of bottom moment is I said, "I have got to do something that's going to remind me of my strength. I've got to do something that's going to bring me back to clarity, simplicity, humility, and strength." And so I went and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. Remember that the only thing that's important is your well-being, your sense of "okay-ness" in the world. So go and get that. ~ Cheryl Strayed

The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer - and yet also, like most things, so very simple - was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying to remain hunched in that remotely upright position while also propelling myself forward when I felt like a building with legs. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I once thought that the Pacific Crest Trail Association used these trail registers to track the progress of individual thru-hikers and make sure that they are not cheating by skipping parts of the PCT. But I learned that is not true. The main purpose of the trail registers was to show me how many people were in front of me so that I could feel slow and inadequate. But I could also learn the names of the people that I would pass so that I could freak them out by calling them by their trail name before they could tell me what it is. Some people write witty things in trail registers, like "Out of food. Stalked by bear. For the love of God please help me." I get a lot of laughs from reading trail registers. When ~ Libby Zangle

It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B.
It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. ~ Cheryl Strayed

How fabulous down was for those first minutes! Down, down, down I'd go until down too became impossible and punishing and so relentless that I'd pray for the trail to go back up. Going down, I realized was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Try Not to bleed so much on the thorns," he said as I jabbed myself in the palm and hissed in pain. "Right Now, anyone could follow us, and you are leaving a very easy trail."
Right, 'cause I'm bleeding all over the place for shits and giggles." A Bramble caught my hair, and I yanked it free with a painful tearing sound.

-Grimalkin and Meghan ~ Julie Kagawa

So you see, if you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the
beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you're doing,
then you become aware also in the same moment and at the same time that you're not only
beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun. Why? Because the process of your
bodily existence and its rhythms is a process, an energy system which is continuous with the
shining of the sun, just like the East River, here, is a continuous energy system, and all the
waves in it are activities of the whole East River, and that's continuous with the Atlantic
Ocean, and that's all one energy system and finally the Atlantic ocean gets around to being
the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, etc., and so all the waters of the Earth are a
continuous energy system. It isn't just that the East River is part of it. You can't draw any
line and say 'Look, this is where the East River ends and the rest of it begins,' as if you can
in the parts of an automobile, where you can say 'This is definitely part of the generator,here, and over here is a spark plug.' There's not that kind of isolation between the elements
of nature. ~ Alan W. Watts

Ask questions, no, screech questions out loud - while kneeling in front of the electric doors at Safeway, demanding other citizens ask questions along with you - while chewing up old textbooks and spitting the words onto downtown sidewalks - outside the Planet Hollywood, outside the stock exchange, and outside the Gap. Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off bridges so that future people digging in the mud will question the world, too. Carve eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe leathers so that your every trail speaks of thinking and questioning and awareness. Design molecules that crystallize into question marks. Make bar codes print out fables, not prices. You can't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question mark stamped on it - a demand for people to reach a finer place ~ Douglas Coupland

For the pride of trace and trail was his, and sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work. ~ Jack London

You should never sit around waiting for life to start because it's leaving you with every second."
"You should explore the world," I said, tears springing to my eyes for no rational reason. "Do dangerous thing. Ignore the fuck out of conventional wisdom. Walk on fire. Treat everyone with kindness because people are the only things worth holding on to. Live without regrets because there is no time for that shit. Never forget the way home, and leave a trail of breadcrumbs if you have to. Love, and get your heart broken, and say fuck it, and love again and then again. ~ Kate Canterbary

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides me; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of it surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garland crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.
-MARK TWAIN in an 1889 Dinner Speech at Delmonico's in New York to honor two baseball teams that had just returned from touring the Pacific, including Honolulu. ~ John Richard Stephens

The Long Hill
I must have passed the crest a while ago
And now I am going down
Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know,
But the brambles were always grabbing at the hem of my gown.
All the morning I thought how proud I should be
To stand there straight as a queen,
Wrapped in the wind and the sun with the world under me
But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen.
It was nearly level along the beaten track
And the brambles caught in my gown
But it's no use now to think of turning back,
The rest of the way will be only going down. ~ Sara Teasdale

Someone once said that the challenge of living is to develop a long obedience in the same direction. When it's demanded, we can rise on occasion and be patient . . . as long as there are limits. But we balk when patience is required over a long haul. We don't much like endurance. It's painful to persevere through a marriage that's forever struggling. A church that never crest 100 members. Housekeeping routines that never vary from week-to-week. Even caring for an elderly parent or a handicapped child can feel like a long obedience in the same direction.

If only we could open our spiritual eyes to see the fields of grain we're planting, growing, and reaping along the way. That's what happens when we endure...

Right now you may be in the middle of a long stretch of the same old routine.... You don't hear any cheers or applause. The days run together―and so do the weeks. Your commitment to keep putting one foot in front of the other is starting to falter.

Take a moment and look at the fruit. Perseverance. Determination. Fortitude. Patience.

Your life is not a boring stretch of highway. It's a straight line to heaven. And just look at the fields ripening along the way. Look at the tenacity and endurance. Look at the grains of righteousness. You'll have quite a crop at harvest . . . so don't give up! ~ Joni Eareckson Tada

Glass flowers exploding. Slow trail of colors down the sky like stains dispersing in the sea, candescent polyps extinguished in the depths. ~ Cormac McCarthy

JENNET What can you see Out there?
THOMAS Out here? Out here is a sky so gentle Five stars are ventured on it. I can see
The sky's pale belly glowing and growing big, Soon to deliver the moon. And I can see
A glittering smear, the snail-trail of the sun
Where it crawled with its golden shell into the hills. A darkening land sunken into prayer
Lucidly in dewdrops of one syllable,
Nunc dimittis. I see twilight, madam.
JENNET But what can you hear?
THOMAS The howl of human jackals-. ~ Christopher Fry

The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast,
and you miss all you are traveling for. ~ Louis L'Amour

They were relaxing at the top of a waterfall, in a small, still pool where the mountain waters hit an upward slope of folded granite. It was sort of a rounded bathtub, carved out of the rock throughout the centuries by the rushing river, a river so hidden that it was without a name. Just below were the falls, about a 30-foot drop into another, much larger pool of clearest water that was gathered for a respite, a compromise in the river's relentless schedule downward, between split-level decks of flat rock. Further on, the river reanimated and released into a sharp ravine, pulling westward, down through the rugged mountains and faceless forest
the Black Hills National Forest
gaining force until it joined with the rush of the Castle River, near the old Custer Trail, and was swallowed into the Deerfield Reservoir to collect and prepare for the touch of man. ~ Ron Parsons

Maya's eyes grew wide, and Grace finally saw the little-sister potential in her. She could imagine Maya toddling after her, annoying her, pulling her hair and borrowing her clothes without asking first. She didn't tell Maya about all the people she'd talked to on the phone, trying to follow a seventeen-year-old trail of bread crumbs that had mostly blown to the wind and taken Joaquin with them. She didn't mention that some people had been rude, others had been so helpful that it made Grace's heart hurt, that Joaquin's family tree seemed to have way too many scraggly branches and not enough roots, not the kind of roots you would need when the storm was strong. ~ Robin Benway

I'd set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again. ~ Cheryl Strayed

A strong wind is blowing and there are little crests of foam on the waves. Look carefully at the millions of shimmering white bubbles rising and then vanishing with each wave. Over and over again, new bubbles come to the surface and then vanish in time with the waves. For a brief moment they are lifted on the wave's crest and then they sink down and are seen no more. We are like that. Each one of us no more than a tiny glimmering thing, a sparkling droplet on the waves of time which flow past beneath us into an unknown, misty future. We leap up, look around us and, before we know it, we vanish again. We can hardly be seen in the great river of time. New drops keep rising to the surface. And what we call our fate is no more than our struggle in that multitude of droplets in the rise and fall of one wave. But we must make use of that moment. It is worth the effort. ~ Gombrich Ernst H

The dinner bell rings, and everyone trots off, Frederick coming in last with his taffy-colored hair and wounded eyes, bootlaces trailing. Werner washes Frederick's mess tin for him; he shares homework answers, shoe polish, sweets from Dr. Hauptmann; they run next to each other during field exercises. A brass pin weighs lightly on each of their lapels; one hundred and fourteen hobnailed boots spark against pebbles on the trail. The castle with its towers and battlements looms below them like some misty vision of foregone glory. Werner's blood gallops through his ventricles, his thoughts on Hauptmann's transceiver, on solder, fuses, batteries, antennas; his boot and Frederick's touch the ground at the exact same moment. ~ Anthony Doerr

I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the street car and the star sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. ~ Everett Ruess

Having the Having"

I tie knots in the strings of my spirit
to remember. They are not pictures
of what was. Not accounts of dusk
amid the olive trees and that odor.
The walking back was the arriving.
For that there are three knots
and a space and another two
close together. They do not imitate
the inside of her body, nor her clean
mouth. They cannot describe, but they
can prevent remembering it wrong.
The knots recall. The knots
are blazons marking the trail
back to what we own and imperfectly
forget. Back to a bell ringing
far off, and the sweet summer darkening.
All but a little of it blurs and leaks
away, but that little is most of it,
even damaged. Two more knots
and then just straight string. ~ Jack Gilbert

But you are crazy."
"I know." She lifted a small box from the basket. "Do you know how I know?"
Scarlet didn't answer.
"Because the palace walls have been bleeding for years, and no one else sees it." She shrugged, as if this were a perfectly normal thing to say. "No one believes me, but in some corridors, the blood has gotten so thick there's nowhere safe to step. When I have to pass through those places, I leave a trail of bloody footprints for the rest of the day, and then I worry that the queen's soldiers will follow the scent and eat me up while I'm sleeping. Some nights I don't sleep very well." Her voice dropped to a haunted whisper, her eyes taking on a brittle luminescence. "But if the blood was real, the servants would clean it up. Don't you think? ~ Marissa Meyer

On life and peaks it is the same. With strength we win the grail, but courage is the thing we need to face the downward trail. ~ Jacob Clifford Moomaw

We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling. ~ T.E. Lawrence

I would like to see more airplay for all artists, no matter what age. I think there's a lot of money being spent toward the young guys, but a lot of the older guys are the ones who blazed the trail for those young guys. ~ Willie Nelson

Bones crushed under her feet as she took the first step into the outer dark. The gunlight revealed his remains. Demon did you suffer? Were you afraid of the end? Did you remember the trail of ruin you left behind? ~ C.J. Anderson

The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. ~ William James

Let me be candid. If I had to rank book-acquisition experiences in order of comfort, ease, and satisfaction, the list would go like this: 1. The perfect independent bookstore, like Pygmalion in Berkeley. 2. A big, bright Barnes & Noble. I know they're corporate, but let's face it - those stores are nice. Especially the ones with big couches. 3. The book aisle at Walmart. (It's next to the potting soil.) 4. The lending library aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, a nuclear submarine deep beneath the surface of the Pacific. 5. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. ~ Robin Sloan

Jackson is the most consummate sketcher I have ever known. These little panels, handy on the trail, could be handled as easily as an expert marksman uses a quiver full of arrows. ~ Arthur Lismer

But I have come to recognize that most of what is memorable and pleasing about my time on the trail is ordinary moments in the outdoors. Simply sitting unhurried in the shade of leaves is an irreplaceable moment. It is a joy in itself to amble through the woods for hours, even when views are limited to the dense trees surrounding me. It is fulfilling to be saturated with the sights, sounds, and smells of the outdoors. My fond recollections of my hike are full of unremarkable moments, like the smell of a dewey morning, the crunch of leaves underfoot, the blaze of a campfire, the soothing trickle of a stream, or rays of sun through a maze of trees. ~ David Miller

Clearly it's not all that pacific on the Pacific Ocean ~ Ilya Ilf

Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause. Breathe. Pause. Move. Pause.
It is unending.
I heave myself over the final lip and strain to pull myself clear of the edge.
I clear the deep powder snow from in front of my face. I lie there hyperventilating.
Then I clear my mask of the ice that my breath has formed in the freezing air.
I unclip off the rope while still crouching. The line is now clear for Neil to follow up.
I get to my feet and start staggering onward.
I can see this distant cluster of prayer flags semisubmerged in the snow. Gently flapping in the wind, I know that these flags mark the true summit--the place of dreams.
I feel this sudden surge of energy beginning to rise within me.
It is adrenaline coursing around my veins and muscles.
I have never felt so strong--and yet so weak--all at the same time.
Intermittent waves of adrenaline and fatigue come and go as my body struggles to sustain the intensity of these final moments.
I find it strangely ironic that the very last part of this immense climb is so gentle a slope.
A sweeping curve--curling along the crest of the ridge toward the summit.
Thank God.
It feels like the mountain is beckoning me up. For the first time, willing me to climb up onto the roof of the world.
I try to count the steps as I move, but my counting becomes confused.
I am now breathing and gasping like a wild animal in an attempt to devour the oxygen that seeps into my mask.< ~ Bear Grylls

There was always a trail, skin cells, a scent, thermal imaging, parts left behind that the riders called prints. Sometimes those proved helpful when tracking an individual, especially if they were fresh. ~ Christine Feehan

I take a nap after supper and dream of the U.S. Navy, a ship anchored near a war scene, at an island, but everything is drowsy as two sailors go up the trail with fishing poles and a dog between them to go make love quietly in the hills: the captain and everybody know they're queer and rather than being infuriated however they're all drowsily enchanted by such gentle love ... (p. 119) ~ Jack Kerouac

136. So good to see you once again. I thought that you were hiding. And you thought that I had run away. Chasing the tail of dogma. I opened my eye and there we were. So good to see you once again I thought that you were hiding from me. And you thought that I had run away. Chasing a trail of smoke and reason. ~ Maynard James Keenan