Our National Parks quotes

Head and hand, where’er thou foot it, And stout heart are still at home. In each land the sun does visit We are gay, whate’er betide: To give room for wandering is it That the world was made so wide.”

The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity;

The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease.

Like Thoreau they see forests in orchards and patches of huckleberry brush, and oceans in ponds and drops of dew.

Few in these hot, dim, strenuous times are quite sane or free; choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much good and making so much money,—or so little,—they are no longer good for themselves.

When, like a merchant taking a list of his goods, we take stock of our wildness, we are glad to see how much of even the most destructible kind is still unspoiled.

The gardens of the Sierra, also, and the noble forests in both the reserved and unreserved portions are sadly hacked and trampled, notwithstanding, the ruggedness of the topography,—all excepting those of the parks guarded by a few soldiers.

In the noblest forests of the world, the ground, once divinely beautiful, is desolate and repulsive, like a face ravaged by disease.

This is true also of many other Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain valleys and forests. The same fate, sooner or later, is awaiting them all, unless awakening public opinion comes forward to stop it.

Poor fellows, they have been poisoned, trapped, and shot at until they have lost confidence in brother man, and it is not now easy to make their acquaintance. As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.

No American wilderness that I know of is so dangerous as a city home “with all the modern improvements.”

One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing else. Lewis and Clark, in their famous trip across the continent in 1804-1805, did not lose a single man by Indians or animals, though all the West was then wild.

Yet it is far safer to wander in God’s woods than to travel on black highways or to stay at home. The snake danger is so slight it is hardly worth mentioning.

Bears are a peaceable people, and mind their own business, instead of going about like the devil seeking whom they may devour.

Poor fellows, they have been poisoned, trapped, and shot at until they have lost confidence in brother man, and it is not now easy to make their acquaintance. As to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence.

while the shepherds, like destroying angels, set innumerable fires, which burn not only the undergrowth of seedlings on which the permanence of the forest depends, but countless thousands of the venerable giants.

If every citizen could take one walk through this reserve, there would be no more trouble about its care; for only in darkness does vandalism flourish.

[4] The reserves of southern California,—the San Gabriel, San Bernardino, San Jacinto, and Trabuco,—though not large, only about two million acres together, are perhaps the best appreciated.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature’s sources never fail.

Like a generous host, she offers here brimming cups in endless variety, served in a grand hall, the sky its ceiling, the mountains its walls, decorated with glorious paintings and enlivened with bands of music ever playing.

Far more time should be taken. Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grass and gentians of glacier meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of Nature’s darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.

The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature’s sources never fail.

Camp out among the grass and gentians of glacier meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of Nature’s darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.

The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature’s sources never fail.

Certainly they cause not the hundredth part of the pain and death that follow the footsteps of the admired Rocky Mountain trapper. Nevertheless, again and again, in season and out of season, the question comes up, “What are rattlesnakes good for?”

As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God’s ways.

Long ago, an Indian to whom a French traveler put this old question replied that their tails were good for toothache, and their heads for fever.

Violet, Morning Mist, Hygeia, Beryl, Vermilion, and Indigo springs, and many beside, give us visions of fountains more beautifully arrayed than Solomon in all his purple and golden glory. All these and a host of others call you to camp.

You may be a little cold some nights, on mountain tops above the timber-line, but you will see the stars, and by and by you can sleep enough in your town bed, or at least in your grave.

Keep awake while you may in mountain mansions so rare.

and a third noble magnolia forest is carefully raised on the top of the second. And so on. Forest was planted above forest and destroyed, as if Nature were ever repenting, undoing the work she had so industriously done, and burying it.

Of course this destruction was creation, progress in the march of beauty through death.

How quickly these old monuments excite and hold the imagination! We see the old stone stumps budding and blossoming and waving in the wind as magnificent trees, standing shoulder to shoulder, branches interlacing in grand varied round-headed forests;

The sun is setting; long, violet shadows are growing out over the woods from the mountains along the western rim of the park; the Absaroka range is baptized in the divine light of the alpenglow, and its rocks and trees are transfigured.

Next to the light of the dawn on high mountain tops, the alpenglow is the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God.

Now comes the gloaming. The alpenglow is fading into earthy, murky gloom, but do not let your town habits draw you away to the hotel. Stay on this good fire-mountain and spend the night among the stars.

Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best.

Though extremely rugged, with its main features on the grandest scale in height and depth, it is nevertheless easy of access and hospitable;

Every summer day is a workday to be confidently counted on, the short dashes of rain forming, not interruptions, but rests. The big blessed storm days of winter, when the whole range stands white, are not a whit less inspiring and kind.

Well may the Sierra be called the Range of Light, not the Snowy Range; for only in winter is it white; while all the year it is bright.

Of this glorious range the Yosemite National Park is a central section, thirty-six miles in length and forty-eight miles in breadth.

But to get all this into words is a hopeless task. The leanest sketch of each feature would need a whole chapter. Nor would any amount of space, however industriously scribbled, be of much avail.

To defrauded town toilers, parks in magazine articles are like pictures of bread to the hungry.

I can write only hints to incite good wanderers to come to the feast.

Much faithless fuss is made over the passage in the Bible telling of the standing still of the sun for Joshua.

Here you may learn that the miracle occurs for every devout mountaineer, for everybody doing anything worth doing, seeing anything worth seeing.

One day is as a thousand years, a thousand years as one day, and while yet in the flesh you enjoy immortality.

Much faithless fuss is made over the passage in the Bible telling of the standing still of the sun for Joshua. Here you may learn that the miracle occurs for every devout mountaineer, for everybody doing anything worth doing, seeing anything worth seeing.

One day is as a thousand years, a thousand years as one day, and while yet in the flesh you enjoy immortality.

From the monument you will find an easy way down through the woods and along the Big Tuolumne Meadows to Mount Dana, the summit of which commands a grand telling view of the alpine region.

The granite domes and pavements, apparently imperishable, we take as symbols of permanence, while these crumbling peaks, down whose frosty gullies avalanches are ever falling, are symbols of change and decay. Yet all alike, fast or slow, are surely vanishing away.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

… the heart of the mountains, we find a new world, and stand beside the majestic pines and firs and sequoias silent and awe-stricken, as if in the presence of superior beings new arrived from some other star, so calm and bright and godlike they are.

Going to the woods is going home; for I suppose we came from the woods originally.

But in some of nature’s forests the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

… revolve, whirling the seeds in a close spiral, and sustaining them long enough to allow the winds to carry them to considerable distances,—a style of flying full of quick merry motion, strikingly contrasted to the sober dignified sailing of seeds on tufts of feathery pappus.

Surely no merrier adventurers ever set out to seek their fortunes.

Only in the fir woods are large flocks seen;

These brown unshakable pillars, standing solitary on polished pavements with bossy masses of foliage in their arms, are exceedingly picturesque, and never fail to catch the eye of the artist.

They seem sole survivors of some ancient race, wholly unacquainted with their neighbors.

I have spent a good deal of time, trying to determine their age, but on account of dry rot which honeycombs most of the old ones, I never got a complete count of the largest. Some are undoubtedly more than two thousand years old;

… though I failed to get anything like a complete count, I learned enough from this and many other specimens to convince me that most of the trees eight to ten feet thick standing on pavements are more than twenty centuries of age rather than less.

Barring accidents, for all I can see, they would live forever.

When killed, they waste out of existence about as slowly as granite.

So the carpet dust and unknowable reeks were preferred. And to think of this being a Boston choice!

Sad commentary on culture and the glorious transcendentalism.

Accustomed to reach whatever place I started for, I was going up the mountain alone to camp, and wait the coming of the party next day. But since Emerson was so soon to vanish, I concluded to stop with him.

The poor bit of measured time was soon spent, and while the saddles were being adjusted I again urged Emerson to stay.

“You are yourself a sequoia,” I said. “Stop and get acquainted with your big brethren.”

But he was past his prime, and was now as a child in the hands of his affectionate but sadly civilized friends, who seemed as full of old-fashioned conformity as of bold intellectual independence.

It was seventeen years after our parting on the Wawona ridge that I stood beside his grave under a pine tree on the hill above Sleepy Hollow.

He had gone to higher Sierras, and, as I fancied, was again waving his hand in friendly recognition.

The entire plant—flowers, bracts, stem, scales, and roots—is red. But notwithstanding its glowing color and beautiful flowers, it is singularly unsympathetic and cold.

Everybody admires it as a wonderful curiosity, but nobody loves it.

Without fragrance, rooted in decaying vegetable matter, it stands beneath the pines and firs lonely, silent, and about as rigid as a graveyard monument.

On he fares through the majestic forests and cañons, facing all sorts of weather, rejoicing in his strength, everywhere at home, harmonizing with the trees and rocks and shaggy chaparral.

Happy fellow! his lines have fallen in pleasant places,—lily gardens in silver-fir forests, miles of bushes in endless variety and exuberance of bloom over hill-waves and valleys and along the banks of streams, cañons full of music and waterfalls, parks fair as Eden,—places in which one might expect to meet angels rather than bears.

In this happy land no famine comes nigh him. All the year round his bread is sure, for some of the thousand kinds that he likes are always in season and accessible, ranged on the shelves of the mountains like stores in a pantry.

From one to another, from climate to climate, up and down he climbs, feasting on each in turn,—enjoying as great variety as if he traveled to far-off countries north and south.

To him almost every thing is food except granite.

Every tree helps to feed him, every bush and herb, with fruits and flowers, leaves and bark; and all the animals he can catch,—badgers, gophers, ground squirrels, lizards, snakes, etc., and ants, bees, wasps, old and young, together with their eggs and larvæ and nests.

their skins make the best beds, and their grease the best butter. Biscuit shortened with b’ar grease goes as far as beans; a man will walk all day on a couple of them biscuit.”

In my first interview with a Sierra bear we were frightened and embarrassed, both of us, but the bear’s behavior was better than mine.

When I discovered him, he was standing in a narrow strip of meadow, and I was concealed behind a tree on the side of it.

“Oh yes, bear-hunting is a mighty interesting business, and safe enough if followed just right, though, like every other business, especially the wild kind, it has its accidents, and Sandy and I have had close calls at times.

Bears are nobody’s fools, and they know enough to let men alone as a general thing, unless they are wounded, or cornered, or have cubs.

In my opinion, a hungry old mother would catch and eat a man, if she could; which is only fair play, anyhow, for we eat them. But nobody, as far as I know, has been eaten up in these rich mountains.

Travelers in the Sierra forests usually complain of the want of life.

“The trees,” they say, “are fine, but the empty stillness is deadly; there are no animals to be seen, no birds. We have not heard a song in all the woods.” And no wonder! They go in large parties with mules and horses;

We have not heard a song in all the woods.” And no wonder! They go in large parties with mules and horses; they make a great noise; they are dressed in outlandish unnatural colors; every animal shuns them.

Even the frightened pines would run away if they could.

But Nature-lovers, devout, silent, open-eyed, looking and listening with love, find no lack of inhabitants in these mountain mansions, and they come to them gladly.

… flocks of hundreds, and make their way into the gardens of towns as well as into the parks and fields and orchards about the bay of San Francisco, where many of the wanderers are shot for sport and the morsel of meat on their breasts.

Man then seems a beast of prey.

Not even genuine piety can make the robin-killer quite respectable. Saturday is the great slaughter day in the bay region.

It is only race living on race, to be sure, but Christians singing Divine Love need not be driven to such straits while wheat and apples grow and the shops are full of dead cattle.

Song birds for food! Compared with this, making kindlings of pianos and violins would be pious economy.

The larks come in large flocks from the hills and mountains in the fall, and are slaughtered as ruthlessly as the robins. Fortunately, most of our song birds keep back in leafy hidings, and are comparatively inaccessible.

Bird and stream are inseparable, songful and wild, gentle and strong,—the bird ever in danger in the midst of the stream’s mad whirlpools, yet seemingly immortal. And so I might go on, writing words, words, words; but to what purpose?

Go see him and love him, and through him as through a window look into Nature’s warm heart.

To cheer and tease him into another view of the case, I said:

“Come, cheer up; smile a little and clap your hands, now that kind Mother Earth is trotting us on her knee to amuse us and make us good.”

But the well-meant joke seemed irreverent and utterly failed, as if only prayerful terror could rightly belong to the wild beauty-making business. Even after all the heavier shocks were over, I could do nothing to reassure him.

You will then find your feet playing a tune, and quickly discover the music and poetry of rock piles,—a fine lesson; and all nature’s wildness tells the same story.

Storms of every sort, torrents, earthquakes, cataclysms, “convulsions of nature,” etc., however mysterious and lawless at first sight they may seem, are only harmonious notes in the song of creation, varied expressions of God’s love.

The Big Tree (Sequoia gigantea) is Nature’s forest masterpiece, and, so far as I know, the greatest of living things.

It belongs to an ancient stock, as its remains in old rocks show, and has a strange air of other days about it, a thoroughbred look inherited from the long ago—the auld lang syne of trees.

… are extremely small and light, being only from an eighth to a fourth of an inch long and wide, including a filmy surrounding wing, which causes them to glint and waver in falling and enables the wind to carry them considerable distances from the tree.

The faint lisp of snowflakes as they alight is one of the smallest sounds mortal can hear.

The sound of falling Sequoia seeds, even when they happen to strike on flat leaves or flakes of bark, is about as faint. Very different is the bumping and thudding of the falling cones.

… saw any that had been cut down to the ground or even to below the branches except one in the Stanislaus Grove, about twelve feet in diameter, the greater part of which was smashed to fragments, leaving only a leafless stump about seventy-five feet high.

It is a curious fact that all the very old Sequoias have lost their heads by lightning.

“All things come to him who waits.” But of all living things Sequoia is perhaps the only one able to wait long enough to make sure of being struck by lightning.

It will be a short job, for the end of the Big Trees is not far.” Of course I stopped.

No true invitation is ever declined.

He had been hungry and tired himself many a time in the Rocky Mountains as well as in the Sierra. Now he owned a band of cattle and lived alone.

Leading me in without a word of mean apology, he made me lie down on the bed, then reached under it, brought forth a sack of apples and advised me to keep “chawing” at them until he got supper ready.

Finer, braver hospitality I never found in all this good world so often called selfish.

Next day with hearty, easy alacrity the mountaineer procured horses, prepared and packed provisions, and got everything ready for an early start the following morning.

Furthermore, that Sequoia can grow and is growing on as dry ground as any of its neighbors or rivals, we have seen proved over and over again. “Why, then,” it will be asked, “are the Big Tree groves always found on well-watered spots?”

Simply because Big Trees give rise to streams.

It is a mistake to suppose that the water is the cause of the groves being there. On the contrary, the groves are the cause of the water being there.

The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted.

The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.

Taking from the government is with them the same as taking from nature, and their consciences flinch no more in cutting timber from the wild forests than in drawing water from a lake or river.

As for reservation and protection of forests, it seems as silly and needless to them as protection and reservation of the ocean would be, both appearing to be boundless and inexhaustible.

The special land agents employed by the General Land Office to protect the public domain from timber depredations are supposed to collect testimony to sustain prosecution and to superintend such prosecution on behalf of the government, which is represented by the district attorneys.

They have so long been allowed to steal and destroy in peace that any impediment to forest robbery is denounced as a cruel and irreligious interference with “vested rights,” likely to endanger the repose of all ungodly welfare.

Gold, gold, gold! How strong a voice that metal has!

“O wae for the siller, it is sae preva’lin’!”

… own experience, as well as that of every civilized nation, show conclusively that the fate of the remnant of our forests is in the hands of the federal government, and that if the remnant is to be saved at all, it must be saved quickly.

Any fool can destroy trees.

They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed,—chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them;