To help inspire you until we get back on the trails again...

"If I walk for an hour, I travel farther than if I fly for six.  I travel deep in to the moment.  And if I walk for more than an hour?  Then it really gets good. A few years ago... I took my vacation out the back door.  I hoisted a pack on my back and walked for three weeks.  Some of it was on a mountain trail, and some of it was on the shoulder of county road, and all of it was glorious, especially as I sank into the rhythm, as the chatter of my internal CNN began to die down.  You see things differently on foot, of course: the rise that goes unnoticed in the car, that can cause you to depress your ankle a degree or two, is immediately obvious... You really get to know the people you walk beside.  The rhythm of walking becomes the rhythm of fellowship."  - Bill McKibben

"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."  - John Muir

"The benefit of the out-of-doors is not t hat it takes us away from civilization, but that it restores us to ourselves.  Its profound essential satisfactions build themselves into the character and become part of the personality."  - Bliss Carman

"All my life through, the new sights of nature made me rejoice like a child."  - Marie Curie

"Taste your legs, sir: put them to motion."  - Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)

"To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness.  I was ready to hike.  I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding.  I wanted to see what was out there.  All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke.  I was going for a walk in the woods."  - Bill Bryson

"If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish."  - Charles Dickens

 "Take nothing for granted.  Not one blessed, cool mountain day or one hellish, desert day, or one sweaty, stinky hiking companion.  It is all a gift."  - Cindy Ross