Quotes about Yosemite

(pointing at El Capitan) That mute appeal illustrates it, with more convincing eloquence than can the most powerful arguments of surpliced priests.            -- Lafayette Bunnell, 1851

... as the scene opened in full view before us, we were almost speechless with wondering admiration at its wild and sublime grandeur.  “What!” exclaimed one at length, “Have we come to the end of all things?” “Can this be the opening of the Seventh Seal?” cries another.            -- James Hutchings, 1855

A passage of scripture is written on every cliff.            -- Thomas Star King, 1860

I hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my vision utterance.  Never were words as beggared for an abridged translation of any Scripture of Nature.            -- Fitz Hugh Ludlow, 1863

I am sitting here in a little shanty made of sugar pine shingles this Sabbath evening.  I have not been at church a single time since leaving home. Yet this glorious valley might well be called a church, for every lover of the great Creator who comes. . . fails not to worship as he never did before.            -- John Muir, 1868

There is so much of Grandeur and reverential Solemnity to Yosemite that a bit of humor may help the better to happily reconcile ourselves to the triviality of Man.  Give me the souls who smile at their devotions!  Now, should this light effort--not altogether truthful, so not altogether dull--afford you a tithe of mirth I shall feel I have added to your reverence for Yosemite. [on his humorous painting of Yosemite Valley that has a cloud sitting in an easy chair on Clouds Rest and a bishop straddling the Cathedral Spires]            -- Jo Mora, 1931

The experience from which these Yosemite poems come is the experience of interacting with the Other--of constantly trying to be aware of the Universe as all one body, of trying not to be separate from it but recognize every part of it as part of yourself.  There is nothing alien in it at all.  Sometimes interacting with the Other remains theoretical.  Even then it is interesting.  Sometimes it is an experience.  When it is, I can make a poem out of it.  It takes on the force of poetry.                        -- Gary Snyder, 1955

I remembered the famous Zen saying, 'When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.'  Upon reaching the top Ryder gives out a beautiful broken yodel of a strange musical and mystical intensity and then suddenly everything was just like jazz.                 -- Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums, Matterhorn Peak, Sierra Nevada, 1958