Tip of the Iceberg Quotes

“Bring a gun and someone slower than you.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Alaska is essentially a small continent: big enough to hold Texas, California, and Montana (the second-, third-, and fourth-largest states) and still have room left over for New England, Hawaii, and a couple of metropolises. It contains seven mountain ranges and ten peaks taller than any in the Lower 48. Its waterfront accounts for half of all the coast in the United States. Louisiana has four times as many miles of paved roads.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Facing down a bear is like facing down a drunk: You just have to bluff that you’re tougher than he is,”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“I fell into the temporary role of spokesman for America, trying to answer questions as best I could: Why do Americans eat so much processed food? Why do they get so little vacation time? (Everyone in our group had more or less taken off the last month of summer.) Why do they love guns? Having been placed in this situation frequently during my travels, I blamed everything on the Republicans, which always satisfies Europeans.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“If you are old, go by all means, but if you are young, wait. The scenery of Alaska is much grander than anything else of its kind in the world, and it is not wise to dull one’s capacity for enjoyment by seeing the finest first.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Alaska’s chief asset, “more valuable than the gold or the fish or the timber, for it will never be exhausted,” is its scenery. Echoing his Elder shipmate John Muir, the father of American mapmaking notes that, for the one Yosemite in California, “Alaska has hundreds.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“The famous introduction to 1901’s Our National Parks shows a touch of manifesto seeping into the pastoral sweetness and natural light: “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Unalaska’s enormous processing plants convert most of it into fillets for fish sticks or a paste called surimi, much of which is frozen in blocks and shipped off to Japan to be reconstituted into budget sushi. “By the time they’re done, it’s odorless, tasteless protein,” Dickrell said. In a century, the local economy had evolved from fur to war to king crab to fake crab.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Because so much of Alaska is hundreds of miles from the road system, the state has six times as many pilots per capita as the rest of the United States. Bush”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Facing down a bear is like facing down a drunk: You just have to bluff that you’re tougher than he is,” David said.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“On June 4, 1892, twenty-seven men met in San Francisco to form the Sierra Club. Muir was chosen as president, a title he would hold until his death.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Because Alaska is such a conservative place, you’ve got this bizarre disconnect between tenaciously clinging to this self-identification as rugged individuals—people who say to themselves, ‘I came here to be free of government regulation’—and the current and historical reality, which is dependence on the federal budget. It’s like living in a floodplain. People are just in total denial about it.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“When he opened the back of his SUV, he had to move some kites to make room for my bag. “You never know when you’ll get the sudden urge to fly a kite,” he said.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“No mining hamlet in the placer gulches of California, nor any backwoods village I ever saw, approached it in picturesque, devil may care abandon.” (This quote is such a point of perverse civic pride that it is reproduced on the wall of the local history museum.)”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“Thanks to railroad men like Harriman, the wild American West had been all but subdued in less than a hundred years. In 1805, Lewis and Clark had witnessed herds of buffalo so large their movements shook the ground.”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“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”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier

“They take our property, take away ground, and when we complain to them about it, they employ a lawyer and go to court and win the case,” one Tlingit leader testified before the district governor in 1884. “We are very poor now. The time will come when we”
― Mark Adams, Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier