Alleging that the Mormons had committed a long list of treasonous acts, in May 1857 Buchanan dispatched a contingent of federal officials to restore the rule of law in Utah, including a new territoria...
An extended stay in the wilderness inevitably directs one’s attention outward as much as inward, and it is impossible to live off the land without developing both a subtle understanding of, and a stro...
And he never quit in the middle of something. If he started a job, he'd finish it. It was almost like a moral thing for him. He was what you'd call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards for...
As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane-as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout-there may be no more potent force than religion.
Between 1840 and 1844 God instructed the prophet to marry some forty women.
Everett was strange, Sleight concedes. Kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.
He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn't a hermit. He did a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up company for the times when he knew nobody would be around.
I knew that people sometimes died climbing mountains. But at the age of twenty-three, personal mortality—the idea of my own death—was still largely outside my conceptual grasp. When I decamped from Bo...
I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were p...
McCandless read and reread The Call of the Wild, White Fang, To Build a Fire, An Odyssey of the North, The Wit of Porportuk. He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they...
Once Everest was determined to be the highest summit on earth, it was only a matter of time before people decided that Everest needed to be climbed.
Quería movimiento, no una existencia sosegada. Quería emoción y peligro, así como la oportunidad de sacrificarme por amor. Me sentía henchido de tanta energía que no podía canalizarla a través de la v...
Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.
The Slabs functions as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society—a tolerant, rubber-tired culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually unemployed. Its constitue...
The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.
We like companionship, see, but we can't stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.
When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and...
Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he...
You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships.
Connoisseurs of geologic form,
Showing 341 to 360 of 419 results