Trails Quotes

“everything is needful that He sends; nothing can be needful that He withholds.”
― John Newton

“Every trail, however erratic and circuitous, is a kind of life-line, a trajectory of growth. 6 This image of life as a trail or path is ubiquitous among peoples whose existential orientations are founded in the practices of hunting and gathering, and in the modes of environmental perception these entail. Persons are identified and characterised not by the substantive attributes they carry into the life process, but by the kinds of paths they leave.”
― Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill

“we often fall because, not knowing how to walk, but not knowing which way to choose.”
― tirumala

“Trails enabled me to better see the world, to notice fine aspects invisible from an airplane, the most basic things we miss. Seeing life at a pace at which you can actually observe nuance, the speed of stepping, the beautiful inspiring texture of “plain” reality becomes visible—God smiling in the detail.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“When tried, trust in invisble God.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“A luminous
mountain morning.
Little flowers
peep out
from the
abandoned trails
in early spring
and gaze at a
new road.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“The undercarraige kissed the snowy earth. Shadowy snow scenes, with frosted trees that shivered, flashed past the side windows. Powedery snow floated on the air. They glided to a standstill. The bird had landed”
― Suzy Davies, The Girl in The Red Cape

“As I keep on running
the sun goes down kissing me Good Night
with those twilight-lips
And in the dark,
moonlight becomes my night’s transport
on which I ride on behind the mountain trails”
― Munia Khan, Fireclay

“The source of modern malaise, he believed, was that civilized people were no longer equipped to survive in nature. They had forgotten how to raise food, how to build things, how to travel on foot. They were entirely dependent on the economy for their survival, which led them to be overworked and unhappy. People needed to get "back to the land,”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“Nothing teaches a man like his trails.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“55 Years ago today President Johnson signed the Wilderness Act of 1964 protecting 9.1 million acres of federal land. Read more about trails thru the wilderness in Trail Tales.”
― Robert Cowdrick

“We all get tested by the trials of life.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“,This is a lovely walk with views of the back of Yosemite National Park and Kaiser Peak ... Perhaps by the time you read and walk this trail, improvements will have been made to clarify the ambiguities. As of this writing, the middle of this walk is more closely a deer and animal trail than a footpath. - Pam Geisel HIKE NUMBER 12: The Dogwood Trail, p. 77”
― Pam Geisel, The Hiker's Guide to the Central Sierras; Shaver, Florence & Huntington Lakes Region

“Fires will rage in California. And I'll wake from nightmares of lions at my tent. And I'll feel like a crazy person when I talk to people about the trail. And I'll ache to come back.”
― Luke Healy, Americana

“On our first afternoon on the trail, the branches bare, two fireflies appeared in the same instant. The lightning bugs twirled sparks and squiggles of pure yellow gold, sometimes taking turns and sometimes harmonizing, their air-flecking fine as precious metal—blinking close, and then diverging, as if they were gently dotting the path of a conversation. They danced in reality; we followed the movement of one spark.

I felt connected to the luminescent creatures, my mind airborne with them. Trails enabled me to better see the world, to notice fine aspects invisible from an airplane, the most basic things we miss. Seeing life at a pace at which you can actually observe nuance, the speed of stepping, the beautiful inspiring texture of “plain” reality becomes visible—God smiling in the detail.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“This may seem an odd idea to us, but only because 40 we think of walking as the spatiotemporal displacement of already completed beings from 1 one point to another, rather than as the movement of their substantive formation within 2 an environment. Both plants and people, we could say, ‘issue forth’ along lines of growth, 3 and both exist as the sum of their trails”
― Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill

“Trails are routes to remembrance just as they are routes to knowledge.”
― T.P. Lye

“What unites the wisest trails, I have found, is a balance of three values: durability, efficiency, and flexibility.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“Not only slugs leave trails of homelessness.”
― Florin-Marian Hera, Ten Loud Rocks

“High and dry above the stupendous detail of our job, we should hold the reason for it all. This is not to cut a path and then say—‘Ain’t it beautiful?" Our job is to open a realm.”
― Benton Mackaye

“The balloon floated just above a ridge that ran along one side of the valley. They could see no one, no ani- mals or sign of any life, but there were trails in the hard sand bed that suggested people occasionally passed this way. Such trails could be misleading, for in the desert they could exist for an eternity, and one could never tell how old they might be.”
― David Ball, Empires of Sand by David Ball

“Among my steps, time stretches, and breath becomes deep, the mind frees itself, the body rejuvenates.”
― David Passarelli, Mountain poems: Musings on stone, forest, and snow

“Life has a way of taking you exactly where you are meant to be. Even when things don’t go according to plan. Even when you sense it’s time to say goodbye to people, places, and things. Even if your unexpected setbacks lead you smack center to new opportunities and profound experiences.”
― Dana Arcuri, Intuitive Guide: How to Trust Your Gut, Embrace Divine Signs, & Connect with Heavenly Messengers

“As you hike the trails, I’d like to remind you that First Nations and Tribes hold jurisdiction over these lands. Many trails come uncomfortably close to our sacred and cultural sites. Please take care and show respect everywhere you hike.”
― Naxaxalhts’i – Albert “Sonny” McHalsie, 105 Hikes In and Around Southwestern British Columbia, 2nd edition

“With unshakeable faith, explore the hidden trails of some mountains. Step into them with unmatched grace.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Coming to Grips with the Mountains and Valleys of This World

“The presence of a trail on paper is no guarantee of its survival on land.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“The USFS simply does not have the capacity or funding to maintain the trail mileage they have built up, and so as the deficit piles up, it is easier to erase trails in the name of "safety" and "sustainability" rather than find solutions that rely on Congress increasing funding for recreational use of our forests. And the USFS isn't alone in this. The GAO, which accounts for the National Park Service (21,000 miles of trail), and the Bureau of Land Management (8,000 miles of trail) outlined the exact same history and forecast of issues regarding underfunding and the loss of recreational access.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“If anything could be gleaned from the varying vintages of maps and countless pages of government fiscal reporting I had collected, it was that the grand majority of trails in the United States do not meet government standards for use. It did not help that the bar for those standards was set as low as it was, amounting to little more than structurally safe bridges, minimal trash, some vegetation management, and maintenance of trail tread and drainage to function for intended use. In fact, on average over the last several decades, only 26 percent of our nation's recorded trail system has met these standards. The other three-quarters of our nation's history lies under encroaching brush, fallen trees, and eroding hillslopes, and that's not to mention the trails that had been erased from current maps. My hunch that they were erasing trails because of funding issues was confirmed through a Freedom of Information Act request for the USFS's strategy to attend to deferred maintenance—a request that returned a nine-page PDF outlining a "purposeful use of scarce funding to deliver the agency's mission and reduce the size of the portfolio, which will result in a reduction of the backlog of deferred maintenance in the long-term." The report itself conveniently erased 7,000 miles of managed trail from the 158,000 that had been noted in the report six years earlier. They called this process "rightsizing.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“Modern trail systems often expand in places that already boast high recreation value. Meanwhile, landscapes with few or forgotten trails are rarely afforded the attention needed to uncover or maintain them. As a result, the worth of a trail increasingly hinges on its economic impact rather than its potential to cultivate connection between people and place. In this imbalance, we risk forgetting that a trail's true value lies not just in the destination but in the stories it carries and the care we offer in return.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“The federal government is struggling to keep up. By 2018, the backlog in trail maintenance had swelled. The American Hiking Society reported that 193,138 miles of trails on federal lands faced a maintenance backlog estimated at $886 million, echoing similar figures across Forest Service-managed land. Nationwide, only about 25 percent of trails meet minimum condition standards, and it remains the case that less than 4 in 10 miles receive any maintenance in a given year.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands