Rocky Mountains

Long before her international fame and a New York Times obituary, O-Six was just another fuzzy wolf pup in Yellowstone National Park’s Northern Range, a descendant of the 1995 gray wolf reintroduction. Her story is brought to life in American Wolf, a work of nonfiction with all the hot-blooded howling of a Jim Harrison novel—romantic drama, bloody turf wars, and seething tensions of social hierarchy among mammals of all stripes, from the wolves themselves to ranchers, ecologists, wolf-watching guides, and elk hunters. Drawing upon thousands of written and multimedia field notes, writer Nate Blakeslee tracks the intertwined lives of O-Six, Yellowstone ranger Rick McIntyre (who documented her every move), and local Wyoming resident Steven Turnbull, a hunter rooted in the ideals of fair chase and living off the land. A 2018 Banff Mountain Book Competition winner, Wolf is a riveting must-read for all who believe in the call of a wilder West.

Justin Farrell's sociology of Teton County, Wyoming — the wealthiest county in America and a case study in what happens when the ultra-rich buy the landscape. Conservation as class privilege. Wilderness as real estate. A book that will make you uncomfortable.

Rick Bass writes about the Yaak Valley of Montana — the wildest place in the Lower 48 — and the fight to protect it. Bass has spent decades arguing for the Yaak's wilderness designation. These essays are the sound of a man who won't stop.

Mark Scott-Nash documents the accidents, rescues, and deaths on Colorado's fourteen-thousand-foot peaks. Sobering, instructive, and a reminder that mountains this accessible can still kill you.

Rick Bass's tribute to his bird dog Colter — a slim, beautiful book about a man and his dog in the Montana wilderness. Bass writes about animals the way most people wish they could talk about the ones they love.

The disputed history of who first climbed the Grand Teton — a controversy that has simmered since the 1890s. Surveyor's claims, rival parties, and the politics of first ascents in the American West.

Doug Peacock spent years alone with grizzly bears in the Yellowstone backcountry, trying to recover from Vietnam. The bears were his therapy. The wilderness was his refuge. Peacock was the model for Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang, and this book explains why.

Gretel Ehrlich's novel set in Wyoming during World War II, when a Japanese American internment camp was built in the shadow of the Absaroka Range. Landscape and injustice, cattle ranches and barbed wire. Ehrlich writes Wyoming the way nobody else can.

Rick Bass's short stories set in Montana's Yaak Valley — the landscape he's spent his life defending. The fiction has the same fierce attachment to place as his nonfiction.

Doug Peacock's second bear book — more focused than Grizzly Years on the biology and politics of grizzly conservation. Peacock has spent more time with wild grizzlies than almost anyone alive, and his authority is absolute.

Adrienne Lindholm's memoir of working as a backcountry ranger in Yellowstone — the solitude, the grizzlies, the beauty, and the slow unraveling of a relationship that couldn't survive the isolation.

Rick Bass's early memoir of working as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi — before Montana, before the Yaak, before he became an environmental writer. The irony of a future conservationist hunting for oil is never stated but always present.

Three novellas set in Montana — hunting, fishing, and the landscape of the Northern Rockies rendered in prose so vivid it feels like weather.

Terry Tempest Williams watched the Great Salt Lake rise and flood the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge while her mother was dying of cancer. The book braids the two losses — landscape and family — into something that feels inevitable. Williams writes about grief the way Abbey writes about anger: without flinching.

The history of the Animas River watershed in southwestern Colorado — from Ancestral Puebloans to the Gold King Mine spill. A river poisoned by mining and a community reckoning with the consequences.

A history of mountaineering in Colorado — from the survey era to modern climbing. The fourteeners and the people who first stood on them.

A decade in a remote cabin in the Colorado Rockies — solitude, snowstorms, bears, and the slow process of making a home in a place that doesn't make it easy.

Hiking the CDT with children — 3,100 miles from Mexico to Canada as a family. The logistics alone are staggering. The story is about what happens to a family when the trail becomes home.

Essays about the obsessive life of the fly fisher — the rivers, the hatches, the solitude, and the nagging suspicion that all this time on the water means something beyond catching fish. The title says everything about the tone.

Bivouacking on every Colorado fourteener — sleeping bags on summits, sunrises at 14,000 feet. A project that turns peak-bagging into something contemplative.

Bass's manifesto for the Yaak Valley — the last wild valley in Montana, under constant threat from logging. Part nature writing, part plea, part rage. Bass has been fighting for this place for thirty years.

We’ve all imagined what it would be like to survive an apocalypse, but Peter Heller imagined it better. It’s nine years after a pandemic, our location a small airport at the base of the Colorado Rockies. Hig (Big Hig to his friends) lives in a compound with his beloved dog, Jasper, and a survivalist and arms aficionado named Bangley, who saw it all coming. Curmudgeonly Bangley is as happy as he’ll ever be, but Hig misses his wife and longs for contact. He hikes into the mountains to fish and he flies a small plane to look for signs of life. No good can come of this, argues Bangley, and events prove him right...or do they? Heller, who made his bones writing magazine stories, delivers a strangely optimistic and regenerative dystopian tale, one that might—might—satisfy even Bangley.

The science and politics of grizzly conservation, distilled from decades of fieldwork and advocacy. Peacock and Louisa Willcox make the case that the bear's fate and ours are inseparable.

A year embedded with Aspen's search and rescue team — the rescues, the body recoveries, the volunteers who show up in the middle of the night. The unglamorous reality of mountain emergencies.

At their population height, an estimated fifty thousand grizzly bears lived in the Lower 48 states, ambling from Alaska to Mexico and the Great Plains to California’s coast. Over the nineteenth century, humans hunted Ursus arctos horriblis to extinction in most states, and by 1980 only a few hundred remained, mostly around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Endangered Species Act protection gave the bears a chance to claw back from the brink, and now more than two thousand grizzlies hang their hats in the American West, rubbing shoulders with the region’s dominant species, Homo sapiens, sometimes with deadly consequences. Informed by a lifetime of residing, reporting, and hiking in grizzly country, Montana journalist Robert Chaney investigates the growing clash in his broadly researched The Grizzly in the Driveway. With perspectives from mountain bikers, tribal leaders, biologists, technology experts, and North America’s strongest animal, Chaney offers a wholehearted, big-thinking primer on the dilemma of coexistence and the control of nature.

Peter Heller’s previous novel, The River, moved as swiftly and eventfully as class V whitewater, but not all readers were pleased with its denouement (one AJ editor and Heller fan threw his copy against the wall in protest). The Guide, though, will likely salve. It opens three years after The River, when Jack, a young Colorado rancher and guide, takes a last-minute gig at an ultra-exclusive fly-fishing lodge near Crested Butte. Spinning with grief, he’s hoping for healing, or at least distraction, but finds trouble the moment he drives up the narrow canyon. The property is bordered, his irritable manager warns, by one neighbor who shoots at interlopers and another whose dogs killed a trespassing angler. Heller, a fly fisherman himself, casts words as poetry, whether describing a backlit hatch, rigging a rod, or “the spreading rings of rising trout, dapping silently like slow rain,” but it’s the mystery that hooks you. Why is there a hidden camera in Jack’s cabin thermostat? And why do you need a gate code to get out?

Short stories set in the Montana wilderness — wolves, bears, and the people who live among them. Bass's fiction has the same intensity as his nonfiction, and the landscape is always a character.

Bass's short stories about geology, landscape, and the people shaped by the land they live on. The rocks are literal — Montana's geology — and metaphorical. The writing is dense and luminous.

Bass searching for evidence that grizzly bears still survive in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. Part natural history, part quest narrative, part argument that wildness persists in places we've given up on.

A pack of wolves returns to Montana's Ninemile Valley, and Bass documents the collision between wildlife and ranching culture. Short, urgent, and partisan — Bass doesn't pretend to be neutral about wolves.

In the 30 years since this collection was released, Rick Bass’s name has become firmly lodged in American literature, especially in the canons of the environment and the West, yet too few know these three short pieces of fiction that stem from early in the petroleum geologist-turned-writer’s career. In “The Myth of Bears,” a wife tries to run away from her trapper husband and the harsh Yukon wilderness. With “Where the Sea Used to Be,” Wallis Featherstone and his dog Dudley search for oil in the Mississippi Delta: “Looking for the thing, the things no one else knew to look for yet, though he knew they would find it, and rip it into shreds. He considered falling in love." And in “The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness,” a woman explores a fierce intimacy with her family’s land in West Texas. At only 189 pages, this is a book best read by headlamp under a brightly lit, starkly beautiful, unsentimental night sky.

Ehrlich moved to Wyoming to recover from grief and found a landscape vast enough to hold it. Ranch life, winter storms, and the particular silence of the high plains. One of the essential books about the American West.

Bass's short stories — Montana, Texas, the landscapes where wildness and domestication collide. The fiction is leaner than the nonfiction, and the sentences are some of his best.

Roosevelt before the presidency — ranching in the Dakota Badlands, hunting, and recovering from the death of his wife. The landscape that made the conservationist president.

The life and death of the greatest steep skier of his generation. Coombs skied lines in Alaska and the Alps that nobody else would touch, then died on La Meije trying to save a friend.

Peacock walking off Vietnam in the American wilderness. The companion piece to Grizzly Years — less about bears, more about the war that sent him to the bears in the first place.

A thru-hike along the wildlife corridor from Yellowstone to the Yukon — following the path that grizzlies, wolves, and caribou need to survive. Conservation biology on foot.

Bass's novel about oil exploration in Montana — the search for ancient seas buried beneath the mountains. Dense, geological, and animated by the tension between extraction and preservation.

Bass's memoir of moving to Montana's Yaak Valley and spending decades defending it. The personal story behind the activism — why a man from Texas chose the wildest place in the Lower 48 and refused to leave.

Bass's journal of a Montana winter — wood-cutting, snowshoeing, and the particular silence of the Yaak Valley under snow. A small book about a cold season in a wild place.

Maclean's investigation of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire that killed thirteen smokejumpers in Montana. Written in his eighties, published posthumously. The prose is as precise as his earlier masterpiece, A River Runs Through It, and the subject is more devastating — young men outrun by fire on a steep hillside.