Quotes from Bruce Barcott

The thing that I still come back away with is how close so many people feel to the mountain Mt. Rainier emotionally and psychically, and yet how far away the world is when you're on the mountain.

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.

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

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.

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.

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;

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.

The Pacific Northwest boasts a long and honorable tradition of rain-soaked misery.

During their coastal wintering, Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery enjoyed a total of twelve days without rain.

In the deep forests of Mount Rainier, the sun doesn't rise, it leaks in thin bands through the trees.

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.

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.

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.

Complexity yields resilience.

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.

The very term "skid row" comes from Seattle's skid road, a logging skid at the center of a large liquor and prostitution industry.)

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.

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.

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.

When the sun shines, the Wonderland Trail is an exhausting but not unrewarding trek. When it rains, the Wonderland's a downright bitch.

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.

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

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.

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.