After all, you go back to Yosemite, as Muir said, “to hear the waterfalls and birds and winds sing … to interpret the rocks, to learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche … and to get as near the heart of the world as you can.” This is hard to do when you’re standing under a waterfall and getting soaked.

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If you don’t talk to the animals, they won’t talk back to you, then you won’t understand, and when you don’t understand you will fear, and when you fear you will destroy the animals, and if you destroy the animals, you will destroy yourself.

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Then as I thought about Hopkins’ words and kept looking around me, I understood what he meant. Gerald Manley Hopkins meant that speckled things or dappled things and striped things or brinded things are all around you, and they are beautiful in their own way.

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I have been to Sedona many times .. And once I even went there in a dark gray rainstorm. At first I felt disappointed until I went out walking and I could see that…. even without its colors, Sedona is just as magical and just as enchanted, but in a different way.

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My own mountain is called Pusch Ridge but that is such a prosaic name for a huge everest that looks like a gigantic dinosaur. He is so much more than that, he of the hidden dragons.

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The main thing you notice about sequoia is that they are tall. You look up and they are tall as far as your eyes can see. They also have gigantic widths. People use to drive their cars through certain open tree trunks in the Sequoia National Forest before the park rangers became more ecologically-minded.

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valley flows the crystal River of Mercy peacefully quiet, reflecting lilies and trees and the onlooking rocks,things frail and fleeting and types of endurance meeting here and blending in countless forms as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures, to draw her lovers in close and confiding communion with her.

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The Grand Canyon seems like a gigantic statement for even Nature to make all in one mighty stone work. Wildness so Godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth’s beauty and size…

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by Jane St. Clair Death Valley has this bad-ass reputation. The Hottest. The Driest. The Lowest spot in North America. It’s got Hells Gate and Furnace Creek. As you drive toward Death Valley, signs warn you — “Extreme Heat”  … “No gasoline for miles” … “You don’t want to go there” … “Are you crazy? […]

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This week I tried to find the oleander and Boy Scouts story in old newspapers. I couldn’t find it. That bothered me because I had by now heard this story many times over the years. The storyteller always told it with great drama and a catch in their voice.

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