Wilderness Survival Quotes

When I began work on my first book, 'The River of Doubt,' which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.

Humans are the big thing that cause damage in life - in war or whatever - and if I can get away from that and into a wilderness situation, I'm OK. You can more or less live on your own merit.

When you're doing mountain rescue, you don't take a doctorate in mountain rescue; you look for somebody who knows the terrain. It's about context.

When I'm in 'Man vs. Wild' mode, it's not pleasure. Every sensor is firing and I'm on reserve power all the time and I'm digging deep - and that's the magic of it as well, and that's raw and it's great.

Grizzly Adams did have a beard.

I like stories in specific time periods. 'The Revenant's' era of American history was fascinating because it was this lawless no-man's land. It defined the idea of the American frontiersman as man conquering nature. In a way, the story of Hugh Glass is about man dominating nature.

Over the years, with hunting, I think what's become my favorite part of hunting is how self-sufficient I'm becoming.

I spent four years in the United States Army between 1985 and 1989, and I certainly learned how to survive out in the woods.

I talk to children in schools all over the world, and I've found that both boys and girls are fascinated by how hunter-gatherers manage to survive entirely on what's around them in their environment: trees, rocks, animals and plants.

You can't leave civilization behind entirely.

I stared at the river far below. "Why did you park us on the mountain? Why not closer?" Bast shrugged, as if this hadn't occurred to her. "Cats like to get as high up as possible. In case we have to pounce on something." "Great," I said. "So if we have to pounce, we're all set.

Part of the beauty of wilderness schooling is that the overheads are very low. You want a classroom? Build a shelter from nature's store. You want to eat? Forage for it.

Death by violence, death by cold, death by starvation - they are the normal endings of the stately creatures of the wilderness. The sentimentalists who prattle about the peaceful life of nature do not realize its utter mercilessness.

There's always hand-to-hand combat. All you need is to come up with a knife, and you'll at least stand a chance. If I get jumped, I'm dead!" I can hear my voice rising in anger. "But you won't! You'll be living up in some tree eating raw squirrels and picking off people with arrows.

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 strong emotional bond with, that land and all it holds.

I grew up in New Hampshire. My closest neighbor was a mile away. The deer and the raccoons were my friends. So I would spend time walking through the woods, looking for the most beautiful tropical thing that can survive the winter in the woods in New Hampshire.

If you can survive in the desert, you survive anywhere. I know more than anything life in desert. You can tell by looking at the dirt how long ago it rained, how hard it rained, how much water came through. You can by looking at a plant, a tree, from an animal's look. I can read the desert like I read my hand.

If you're shipwrecked on an island with 10 million dollars and your wife has gold and diamonds, but there's no water, no arable land, no fish, you have nothing. Money is a 'nothing' thing.

I'm a little lamb who's lost in the wood.

Textbook survival tells you to stay put. Stop. Wait for rescue. Don't take any risks. But there'd been a whole host of survival shows like that and I didn't really want to do that.

On my first bowhunt on the property a few years back, I was on my own for twenty-two days and killed an amazing thirty-three head of big game. I'm surprised I even came home. I was in heaven.

I did 'The Grey,' and it was very intense and emotional because we're in the wilderness, and it was always 30 degrees. You kind of lose your sense of reality in the fact that you're filming a movie.

Fit for the mountains and the barbarous caves, where manners ne'er were preached.

Specifically choose not to take a GPS. Just create a challenge. You can climb Everest or walk across Antarctica with minimal gear and still have that sense of adventure. But in terms of exploration, Google Earth has this world mapped down to the square foot.

You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them.