Image via Timothy Denney, Dark Canyon, Utah

Here is a little wilderness inspiration as we slip deeper into the Winter.  These are pictures from a wilderness trip in July 2019 to the White Cloud Peaks in the Salmon River country of central Idaho.  One of my favorite “secret spots” in the wild western places.  Read on at the end of the post for words of wilderness inspiration.

Hatchet Lake and Peak 10,278

Hummock Lake

Pale Columbine at the outlet of Lodgepole Lake

Isaiah the prophet wrote these words of our God: “In repentance and rest you will be saved, In quietness and trust is your strength.”  It is for repentance from the cares and pressures of life in this world that I go to the wilderness.  It is for quietness of the solitude, and the trust that is born out of the difficulties and dangers of living in the wilds that I stay there as long as I can.  Others have also found the truth of these words in the solitude of the wilderness.

Nancy Newhall – “The Wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.”

Robert MacFarlane – “Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia.”

Aldo Leopold – “To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”

Henry David Thoreau – “We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

Frederick Buechner – “To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness – especially in the wilderness – you shall love him.”

I hope you can find your solitude, repentance, quietness, trust, and love in the wilderness.