Within minutes my 115-mile walk through the desert hills becomes a thing apart, a disjunct reality on the far side of a bottomless abyss, immediately beyond physical recollection.But it's all still there in my heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure-they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days to come, like a treasure found and then, voluntarily, surrendered. Returned to the mountains with my blessing. It leaves a golden glowing on the mind.

Taxation: how the sheep are shorn.

We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.

My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.

I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?

The New Age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirit's weak.

A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.