Crocodiles and Ice recounts Jon Turk's journey from suburban Connecticut into Deep Wild, an ancient passage, repeated — in one form or another — a zillion times, and ignored just as often. 

It is a storyteller's passage of discovery, full of high adventure and humour on his multiple award-winning Ellesmere Circumnavigation, as well as on expeditions in the jungles and oceans of the Solomon Islands, on the Himalayan plateau, and across the mountains of northern British Columbia. Throughout all these expeditions, Crocodiles and Ice explores a Consciousness Revolution toward a personal, spiritual, and reciprocal relationship with the planet “ even as our oil-soaked, internet-crazed, consumer-oriented society rushes rapidly and recklessly into massive and catastrophic climate change. He invites his readers to listen to our ancestors, a wolf that lingers, a Siberian shaman, a Chinese bicycle nomad, a lonely Tlingit warrior laying down to die in a storm, and the landscapes themselves. Because beyond technological marvels and imagined responsibility, there lies a glorious and sustainable lifestyle that is based — not on consumerism and consumption — but on Deep Wild as a place of solace, sanity, and hope.

Jon Turk grew up on the shores of a wooded lake in Connecticut, attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then Brown University. He earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1971 and was nominated by National Geographic as one of the Top Ten Adventurers of the Year in 2012. Between these bookends, he co-authored the first college-level environmental science textbook in North America, followed by more than 30 additional texts in environmental, physical, and Earth sciences. At the same time, Jon kayaked around Cape Horn and across the North Pacific from Japan to Alaska, mountain biked across the northern Gobi in Mongolia, made first climbing ascents of big walls on Baffin Island and first ski descents in the Tien Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzia, and in 2011 circumnavigated Ellesmere Island. He has published numerous magazine articles and four adventure books: Cold Oceans, In the Wake of the Jomon, The Raven’s Gift, and Crocodiles and Ice. During extended travel in northeast Siberia, his worldview was altered by Moolynaut, a Siberian shaman. Jon splits his time between Darby, Montana (near the southwestern boundary of Montana and Idaho, along the Continental Divide), and Fernie, British Columbia. For more information, see jonturk.net.

Jon Turk's profile page

"Jon Turk shares the importance of finding the wild in our daily lives. An important read as our society collides headlong into an over-subscribed world." ~Conrad Anker, The North Face extreme Alpinist

"Jon Turk takes us on his personal journeys to Earth's remote places where one becomes embedded in the natural world as experienced by our ancestors." ~Henry Pollack, Co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, and author of A World Without Ice.

"His journeys and encounters embody a unique combination of physical audacity, deep humility, and extraordinary trust in what comes - the ingredients of wisdom, and of real adventure."

~John Vaillant: Environmentalist, author of The Golden Spruce, The Tiger, and The Jaguar's Children.