Wilderness has been characterized as barren and unproductive; little can be grown in its sand and rock. But the crops of wilderness have always been its spiritual values - silence and solitude, a sense of awe and gratitude - able to be harvested by any traveler who visits.

When it's one animal, you really do have a tougher time because you've gotta commit to story structures that maybe are difficult to find the range in the animal to tell those stories. There are only so many things they do, if they're living in the natural world, that we can appreciate. There are plenty of things that they do that we don't appreciate.

I grew up as a cameraman, so it's much easier for me to shoot it myself. I work with an operator and a crew, but it's way easier for me to function as a cinematographer, than to have a cinematographer between me and the lens. I don't need that.

The joy of viewing land, the hope of in a few days ranging through the long wished-for spot and the pleasure of again resuming my wonted employment may be readily calculated.

I'm the most experienced cinematographer in this medium, so there's no point in having that extra conversation in the middle of the loop. You're making the film in relation to what's happening now, and you can't really affect what's happening now. It's not like you're in control of anything in front of the camera. If you're calling yourself the director and you're not the cinematographer, I think you're kidding yourself.

A forest of these trees is a spectacle too much for one man to see.

The wilderness is a place of rest - not in the sense of being motionless, for the lure, after all, is to move, to round the next bend. The rest comes in the isolation from distractions, in the slowing of the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance.