This file includes Hills, Mountains, and Valleys and Canyons.


Page Toppers


Music in the Hills

(Aldo Leopold)

This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all . . . On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen . . . and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it--a vast pulsing harmony--its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

Every Child Should Know a Hill

(Edna Casler Joll)

Every child should know a hill,
And the clean joy of running down its long slope
With the wind in his hair.
He should know a tree . . .
The comfort of its cool lap of shade,
And the supple strength of its arms
Balancing him between earth and sky
So he is a creature of both.
He should know bits of singing water . . .
The strange mysteries of its depths,
And the long sweet grasses that border it.
Every child should know some scrap
Of uninterrupted sky, to shout against;
And have one star, dependable and bright,
For wishing on.

How to Tell the Top of a Hill

(John Ciardi)

The top of a hill
Is not until
The bottom is below.
And you have to stop
When you reach the top
For there's not more UP to go.

To make it plain
Let me explain:
The one most reason why
You have to stop
When you reach the top--is:
The next step up is sky.

Songs about Hills


Page Toppers


Rough Country

(Dana Gioia)

Give me a landscape made of obstacles,
of steep hills and jutting glacial rock,
where the low-running streams are quick to flood
the grassy fields and bottom lands.

A place no engineers can master--where the roads
must twist like tendrils up the mountainside
on narrow cliffs where boulders block the way.

Where tall black trunks of lightning-scalded pine
push through the tangled woods to make a roost
for hawks and swarming crows.

And sharp inclines
where twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush,
scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly
to find an unexpected waterfall,
not half a mile from the nearest road,
a spot so hard to reach that no one comes.

A hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies
and nesting jays, a sign that there is still
one piece of property that won't be owned.

They Speak to Me

(Chief Dan George)

The beauty of the trees,
the softness of the air,
the fragrance of the grass,
speaks to me.
The summit of the mountain,
the thunder of the sky,
speaks to me.
The faintness of the stars,
the trail of the sun,
the strength of fire,
and the life that never goes away,
they speak to me.
And my heart soars.

Songs about Mountains

ValleyS and CanyonS


Songs about Valleys and Canyons