Bruce Barcott > Quotes

“We know people by their stories: their history, their habits, their secrets, their triumphs and failures. We know them by what they do. We want to know mountains too, but they’ve got no story. So we do the next best thing. We throw ourselves onto them and make the stories happen.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“The mountain receives our expressions and becomes part of us; we imprint our memories upon it and trust it with out dearest divisions of out lives. Mt. Rainier does not exist under our feet. Mt. Rainier lives in our minds”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“This is what we see when we look up at Rainier, the beauty, the horror, the awe the unbelievability of size that confirms our own consequence on this earth. We look at the mountain, like god and can imagine nothing larger. Its incompressible life-span reminds us of the fleeting mortality of our own bones. It looms over our lives on clear days and and stay present but hidden through the clouds of winter. Like god it remains everywhere forever.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“Civilization proceeds in a direction opposite from everything mountains represent: starvation, hardship, coldness, the constant scramble to survive...People used to avoid mountains, but now we seek their company. We come for the pretty sights, but also to find a place still free from those life-saving constraints. We come to the mountain seeking beauty and terror.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“Only a fool has never climbed Mount Fuji; only a fool has climbed it more than once.” I needed that once. John I became disoriented”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“How do you keep this place running?" I said. "How did you think it would work in the first place?"
She smiled. "I was dumb enough to give it a try.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird

“The rain is here because of the mountain. Warm, moist air from the Pacific Ocean flows over Western Washington and bumps into the Cascade Range. The air cools and condenses into clouds; it rains. From on high it looks as if a barn of cotton blew in and snagged on the jagged ridges of the Cascades.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“A lot of these ridges formed during the ice ages,” he explained. “Imagine filling all the existing valleys with ice, then sending lava flows out along the margins of those glaciers. When the flow hits the ice it hardens and creates a dam, so instead of flowing onto the glacier it continues down the ridge. When the ice age ends, the glaciers melt away and you get pretty much what you see now.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“Learning to climb a mountain is like repeating infancy. First you master the act of breathing, move on to walking, then accept the challenge of falling down without bonking your head.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“Complexity yields resilience.”
― Bruce Barcott, Arctic Fever

“In the 1840s the Nisqually Glacier reached about nine hundred feet past the Nisqually River bridge on the Paradise Road. Today the terminus sits more than a mile upvalley. The Carbon is currently in mild retreat; the ice at the terminus is melting back faster than the motion of the glacier can push it ahead. It has shrunk twenty feet every year since 1986.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“Simple commands, positive reinforcement, show no fear: More than a quarter century after her apprenticeship with Romanian tiger tamer, Sharon was still using his tenets to save the last great cats in the Western Hemisphere.”
― Bruce Barcott

“One of the most famous aphorisms in science is the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane’s answer to the question, What might one conclude about God based on a study of His creation? “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“When the sun shines, the Wonderland Trail is an exhausting but not unrewarding trek. When it rains, the Wonderland’s a downright bitch.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“My father’s desire to climb the mountain was so strong that it had crushed one of the deepest instincts bred in the human bone: the sense to not look silly in front of the neighbors.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“You take bits off crickets and they grow new parts,” Edwards explains in his cheery New Zealand accent. “My interest in this alpine work is that you find creatures growing in habitats where you wouldn’t expect anything to be.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“In the deep forests of Mount Rainier, the sun doesn’t rise, it leaks in thin bands through the trees.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“Indian Bar’s reputation as a notorious bear enclave can be accounted for by the acres of blueberries surrounding the camp. While they draw the bears, the berries also assure backcountry campers that bears will look upon them as nuisances in the berrypatch rather than two hundred pounds of meat on the hoof. That is, if you arrive during berry season. Which I did not. A ranger had issued me a wilderness permit to pitch my tent among the bears outside the designated camp, but by the time I’d bushwhacked to the top of a ridge above the Ohanapecosh River, I’d begun to question the wisdom of my decision. Every tentsize clearing under every tree bore the wilderness equivalent of a coat on a theater seat: bear scat big as cowpies and puddingly fresh.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“The approaching storm” is a hollow phrase in the city, where it’s impossible to see much of anything approach, let alone witness a storm ride a five-mile sky. Skyscrapers shrink our view to a series of slots. We live in trenches. On the mountain, weather can’t be ignored or outrun;”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“(The very term “skid row” comes from Seattle’s skid road, a logging skid at the center of a large liquor and prostitution industry.)”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“People like Sharon are rare and strange and sometimes aggravating. They don't calm choppy waters. They barge in and stir things up when and make people frown when they'd rather smile. But sometimes all that smiling acts as a cover for a lot of wicked acts. But a good portion of my life I believed that a law of benevolent action held sway in the world. This law maintained that if you did the right thing and worked hard, eventually things would work out; that the world generally tended towards fairness, decency, and wisdom. But of course the world doesn't work that way. The people who learn that lesson through crushing experience and still refuse to bow to it astound me. They go on fighting, again and again and again. These people aren't perfect. They aren't simple heroes. They are complex human beings. And we need them. Because without them the world would be lost.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird

“What will our descendants think when they come upon Chalillo? When they scrape away the deep layer of dirt covering in stepping-stone facade, what will they make of the dogleg desig, the Chinese gauges, the long-stopped turbines? What will they make of the skeletons and fossils long gone? Will they connect the two?”
― Bruce Barcott, The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird

“The barometric pressure at sea level is 760 torr, a unit of measure named after Torricelli. By 10,000 feet the pressure has dropped to 525 torr, and at the 14,410-foot summit of Mount Rainier the pressure is around 440 torr, or more than forty percent less than at sea level. Most of the air collects at the bottom of the troposphere. When you stand atop Mount Rainier, almost half the weight of the world’s air floats beneath you.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“People used to avoid mountains, but now we seek their company. We come for the pretty sights, but also to find a place still free from those life-saving constraints. We come to the mountain seeking beauty and terror.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“This is how I think of Mount Rainier, not as an icon of permanence but as a source of relentless change, a mountain forever falling.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“This is not about you. Nobody gives a shit whether you like pot or hate it. This is a race issue. It's a civil rights issue. It's about millions of people losing their liberty and their lives because of ridiculous drug laws that do not work. There are generations of black men in prison because they were caught with a substance that's less harmful than alcohol. You're a white guy, so you don't have to worry about it. Others do.”
― Bruce Barcott, Weed the People: The Future of Legal Marijuana in America

“Falling water has always been a healing balm when I find myself with a despairing mind and cracking soul. The winter rains of Puget Sound, which never start and stop but only drizzle on, signal the cool comfort of home.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“Most active winter bugs can supercool their bodies to a range of–6 to–12 degrees Celsius, going lower by producing more glycerol and dropping the water content in their bodies.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier

“They could take this away from you, too," I said.
"Who take what?"
"Government. Shut down the harpy project."
"Nahh," she said. "No way. And even if they did, I'd find something else. You don't stop. If you lose a battle, that doesn't mean you stop. You keep fighting, You find other battles. The work to save what's left of nature is endless. You can get really down and depressed. But you can't stop and stand aside and let the wheels keep rolling in the wrong direction.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird

“During their coastal wintering, Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery enjoyed a total of twelve days without rain.”
― Bruce Barcott, The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier