Home > Author > Conor Knighton
1 " In letter after letter, misfortunes great and small are blamed on the wood. "I don't know how much I buy that," Matt [Smith] said.."If you're the kinda person who would take something from a national park, maybe you just have poor judgement skills. "
― Conor Knighton , Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park
2 " Shelton Johnson may just be the best park ranger who ever lived. "
3 " If nature has a soul, it feels like it must be bound up in the bark and sap of our forests. There, older, wiser sentinels stand in silent judgment. Not just the ancient sequoias and redwoods—even regular pine and birch trees outlast us. Every tree is a witness tree—they see how we spend our time on earth, what we take and what we give. "
4 " It occurred to me that part of the reason I’d seen so much debate about the year’s first sunrise, and not its last sunset, was that our beginnings always seem more important than our endings. In life, we can often control how things start. Endings are elusive and amorphous and uncertain. "
5 " To sit home, read one’s favorite paper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective,” he wrote. “It is what evil men count upon the good men’s doing. "
6 " So abundant and novel are the objects of interest in a pure wilderness that unless you are pursuing special studies it matters little where you go, or how often to the same place,” he wrote. “Wherever you chance to be always seems at the moment of all places the best. "
7 " In the national parks, all are just Americans.” Visit a park, he says, and “Perhaps for the first time, one realizes the common America—and loves it. "
8 " When advocating for the sequoias, Muir once wrote, “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand storms; but he cannot save them from sawmills and fools; this is left to the American people. "
9 " Black Canyon is often far deeper than it is wide—it’s a sheer drop down to the bottom. "
10 " Former Park Service director Jon Jarvis has said that climate change is “fundamentally the greatest threat to the integrity of our national parks that we have ever experienced. "
11 " Recently, we've started to think more about how the bright lights from our screens are affecting our bodies. But I wonder how the lights from our cities might be affecting our souls. As people, we arrived on the planet with a "dark mode" pre-installed, but for the past century, we've been turning it off. In an effort to see our own world more clearly, we have obscured our view of the other worlds and—quite possibly—of the divine. "
12 " Indicator species are the canaries in the coal mine—they remind us of the bigger picture. "
13 " Since 1835, the Exit Glacier has retreated, on average, about forty-six feet per year,” she said. “And more recently, say 2014, it retreated 151 feet. So a huge increase in the rate of retreat. "
14 " By the end of the summer, Exit Glacier was measured to have retreated an estimated 262 feet—the most significant year ever recorded. "
15 " Like that stolen wood at Petrified Forest, once a piece of you has been taken, it can’t be put back. "
16 " The parks are our indicator species. Living laboratories where we can see—sometimes in something as simple as a photograph—that trouble is coming. If glaciers continue to melt at their current rate, then one day soon entire Alaskan villages will be underwater. People are already dying from wildfires caused, in part, by the longer, hotter summers brought on by climate change. "
17 " Nature, God, Creator, Beauty—they’re all used to describe an entity greater than ourselves. "
18 " On any given night, the same constellations, planets, and galaxies pass over all three places. The sky is what links us together. It’s a concept I first learned from the renowned animated astronomer Fievel Mousekewitz. "
19 " no longer think there’s one specific path that leads to enlightenment or salvation. I don’t think Muir did, either. Except, perhaps, for the path of the trail itself. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” he once wrote. I don’t know what, if anything, comes after this life. But I can tell you this: If there is a Heaven, I bet it looks a lot like Yosemite. "
20 " This was the first national park that was set aside by the National Park Service, by the people of the United States, for what is alive,” Alan explained "
