Alaska Glacier Quotes

She was drowning—in friendliness, in community—and she was starting to think she didn't want to get pulled out.

Don't you realize it's the doing that often gets us into trouble? It's not the doing that makes God happy. It's not about what we've done...it's about what been done for us.

The more we are removed from nature, the more we are denied our birthright to play in forests, climb mountains, follow streams, and fall in love with meadows, to become creative, self-actualized, deeply intuitive.

It's hard to know, isn't it, whether the things we face are just because the world is full of sin and sinful people, or if God is working out a plan,' Grandma continued. 'I happen to think it's both. There's sin, but through it all, He takes the mess we make and paints a masterpiece. In fact, I'm quite certain that before God can ever bless a woman—and use her to impact many—He uses the hammer, the file, and the furnace to do a holy work.

The last frontier is not Alaska, outer space, the oceans, or the wonders of technology. It’s open-mindedness. Honor the land and its first nation peoples, and their ability to acquire wisdom, sustenance, and happiness from the wild plants and animals around them. Learn through story. Sleep on the ground. Listen. Travel by kayak and canoe.

If anyone can be trusted, it's the Savior. He's always true, always faithful, loving, kind, right. ... He never left me then, but stayed firm and strong, like a rock. I learned—even though it's tough sometimes—my Father knows best.

We are not here to exist; we are here to live, to face death and stare it down. We are here to trust in God and to embrace this world in all its quiet and violent beauty, to break down the walls of our own prejudices and believe in something greater than ourselves. We are here to paddle into our worst fears and come out the other side to discover glaciers, to meet them face-to-face, and to celebrate a sense of wonder and God's plan that we find only in Nature.

I live in one of the best places, bar none, to appreciate the wild natural environment. I also live in one of the most politically difficult places to work on its behalf: Alaska.

For Muir, Emerson and Thoreau were insufficiently wild; they thought from the head down, not feet up.

Among those who could read, books were prized possessions. Words on paper were powerful magic, seductive as music, sharp as a knife at times, or gentle as a kiss. Friendships and love affairs blossomed as men and women read to each other in summer meadows and winter kitchens. Pages were ambrosia in their hands. A new novel or collection of poems was something everybody talked about. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Bronte, Austen, Dickens, Keats, Emerson, Cooper, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Twain. To read these authors was to go on a grand adventure and see things as you never had before, see yourself as you never had before.

In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with 200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost 3,000 miles away in Texas, water sloshed out of swimming pools. A street in Anchorage fell twenty feet. The quake devastated 24,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it glaciated. And what effect did all this might have on Alaska’s glaciers? None.

For the first time I understood why people come back from Alaska with fifty pictures of glaciers or return from a honeymoon in Tahiti with fifty pictures of the same sunset. The world is so beautiful in these places, it is impossible to register that there will be more, more, more. Surely this is it. Negotiate with your ailing camera battery. How can it not stay alive for this? How can you believe that twenty minutes from now there will be an even taller forest, an even wider waterfall? We are only as good as our most extreme experiences.

busy, as if hearing the command ‘Increase and multiply and replenish the earth.’” In so writing, Muir turned Genesis on its head, according to biographer Stephen Fox, “for in the Bible it ordered man to multiply and then ‘subdue’ the world to his own purposes, to establish ‘dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’” In Muir’s version, all natural organisms were to reproduce for their own purposes, not to serve man alone. “In his pantheism,” Fox wrote, Muir “sensed a corresponding affinity with their [Tlingit] religious ideas. Freed of Christianity’s human conceits, they prayed to nature gods and allowed nonhuman creatures—like Stickeen—into their heaven.

Here’s another interesting thought. If glaciers started reforming, they have a great deal more water now to draw on—Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes, the hundreds of thousands of lakes of Canada, none of which existed to fuel the last ice sheet—so they would grow very much quicker. And if they did start to advance again, what exactly would we do? Blast them with TNT or maybe nuclear warheads? Well, doubtless we would, but consider this. In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with 200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost 3,000 miles away in Texas, water sloshed out of swimming pools. A street in Anchorage fell twenty feet. The quake devastated 24,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it glaciated. And what effect did all this might have on Alaska’s glaciers? None.

the 1918 sinking of the Princess Sophia in Lynn Canal. 11. Federal Building – A few blocks south along Glacier Avenue, at the corner

God made something special when He made you.

She’s heard that the glaciers in the Alaska territory hold such an extraordinary azure color they seem to have trapped the sky beneath the ice.

Anthropologists have always debated the forces that drove nomadic hunters to push themselves around the world... Imagine that you’re a hunter moving down the coastlines of Alaska and British Columbia, the first person to ever set foot on that land. …You come to the edge of a hundreds-of-feet-tall glacier that terminates at the ocean in a sheer cliff that’s calving house-sized chunks of ice. You have two options: one, turn back and make your home at the last place along your route that looked like a suitable habitat; or two, build a skin boat, load up your family, and paddle southward, trusting that there’s another side to the glacier. For thousands of years, this continent belonged to those people with the tenacity and curiosity to choose option number two.

I felt a strange twinge of anger looking at the stars. It was as if I’d just learned of an inheritance that had been stolen from me. If it wasn’t for Alaska, I might have gone my whole life without knowing what a real sky was supposed to look like, which made me wonder: If I’d gone the first quarter of my life without seeing a real sky, what other sensations, what other glories, what other sights had the foul cloud of civilization hid from my view? We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us. We can’t miss the million-strong flocks of passenger pigeons that once blackened our skies. We don’t really miss the herds of bison that grazed in meadows where our suburbs stand. And few think of dark forests lit up with the bright green eyes of its mammalian lords. Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this. But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us?

I remember a moment late in the 2008 presidential campaign when Barack Obama returned to his birth state of Hawaii for a vacation. Some pundits criticized this decision for the optics, arguing that our fiftieth state might strike some voters as exotic and foreign. At the same time, there was also a candidate on the ballot from the forty-ninth state, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. The glaciers and tundra of the Last Frontier are just as exotic as the beaches and palm trees of Hawaii, but I don’t remember hearing that Alaska was somehow bad for campaign optics. What I think was at issue wasn’t geography but race. Hawaii is the most diverse state in the Union, the result of waves of Asian immigration. By contrast, Alaska is predominantly white, save for a considerable population of Native Americans.

The human toll of a rapid climate shift was hard to predict. But the best estimates involved a hellish combination of severe coastal flooding, drought, wildfires, and hurricanes that stood to displace millions of people and overwhelm the capacities of most governments. This in turn would increase the risk of global conflict and insect-borne disease. Reading the literature, I pictured caravans of lost souls wandering a cracked earth in search of arable land, regular Katrina-sized catastrophes across every continent, island nations swallowed up by the sea. I wondered what would happen to Hawaii, or the great glaciers of Alaska, or the city of New Orleans. I imagined Malia, Sasha, and my grandchildren living in a harsher, more dangerous world, stripped of many of the wondrous sights I’d taken for granted growing up.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have now entered Holkham Bay, named by Captain George Vancouver in 1794. It has two branches, Tracy Arm to the north, and Endicott Arm to the south. “We are heading first into Tracy Arm, which was named by Lieutenant Commander Mansfield of the U.S. Navy, for Benjamin Franklin Tracy, Secretary of the Navy from 1889 to 1893. Mansfield, commander of the survey vessel, Patterson, in Alaska from 1889 to 1913, also named Sawyer Glacier, which you will see at the head of this arm, and which calves the hundreds of icebergs you will see floating in the waters of the arm. This passage was carved centuries ago during an ice age by a massive glacier which completely filled the channel. You can see the signs of its passing in the scoring of the bare rock walls. Avalanche chutes further scar the walls each spring and, as you can already see ahead of us, these are occupied by spectacular waterfalls. We will shortly stop near one of these so you can view it close up and feel how cold the water is coming directly off an unseen glacier at the top. “After visiting Sawyer Glacier, we will go back and turn up Endicott Arm, named for William Endicott, a member of the Massachusetts legislature and the U.S. Senate, to see Dawes Glacier. He was secretary of war from 1885 to 1891. Part way up Endicott Arm we will come to Ford’s Terror, a branch of Endicott Arm which has very strong tidal currents.

This I was certain: Glacier Bay offered a clarity more profound than any book; an original text, a reminder that our language evolved as we moved away from places like this, not into them.

With 586,400 square miles, Alaska is the largest state in the U.S. It’s home to over half the world’s glaciers, the highest mountain in North America, 29 volcanoes, and over 33,000 miles of coastline. Only around 700,000 people live there, so I would say there’s lots of room for adventure.

Tectonic power and glacial force push and pull the geology, spreading it to it's absolute limit, yet layered and rich with hues of darkness, immortality, and mysteries not meant for men.

As she stares into the cool prisms of blues and whites, and the clear parts which fracture the light, she notices something deeper. It is a light from within the ice. It's beautiful; so she stays.

I told him he must reform, for a man who neither believed in God nor glaciers must be very bad, indeed the worst of all unbelievers. —John Muir, Travels in Alaska

They seemed to be losing heart with every howl of the storm, and fearing that they might fail me now that I was in the midst of so grand a congregation of glaciers, which possibly I might not see again, I made haste to reassure them, telling them that for ten years I had wandered alone among mountains and storms, and that good luck always followed me; that with me, therefore, they need fear nothing; that the storm would soon cease, and the sun would shine; and that Heaven cared for us, and guided us all the time, whether we knew it or not: but that only brave men had a right to look for Heaven's care, therefore all childish fear must be put away.