The Roadless Yaak: Reflections and Observations About One of Our Last Great Wild Places

by Rick Bass (Editor)

This collection of essays about the Yaak Valley in northwestern Montana brings to life the wilderness and isolation, exhilaration and trepidation that visitors (and residents) encounter here. The half-million-acre Yaak Valley is home to only 150 people but untold numbers of elk, deer, grizzly bears, cougars, and other critters, big and small. An astonishing 175,000 acres remain roadless in this remote territory near the Canadian border. Read about a mother who spends Thanksgiving weekend in the Yaak with her children. ....the Yaak is where my children and I together have fallen headlong into the glory of the unfamiliar, into the last of the planet's wilderness, the unpredictability of the natural landscape, the authentic hush possible only away from the clamor." (from "Traveling Close to Home" by Debra Gwartney). You will learn about a teacher who is torn between the world beyond the Yaak and the life he has come to mountains, thick forests, snow, and bears. And you will learn why we as a people must protect wilderness like this for future generations.

Contributors

Todd Tanner
Bill McKibben
Gregory McNamee
Jeff Ferderer
Amy Edmonds
Scott Daily
John Lane-Zucker
Sue Halpern
Tim Linehan
Debra Gwartney
Bob Shacochis
Doug Peacock
Annick Smith
William Kittredge
Jim Fergus

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Rick Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston, the son of a geologist. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University and while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, began writing short stories on his lunch breaks. In 1987, he moved with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, to Montana’s remote Yaak Valley and became an active environmentalist, working to protect his adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging. He serves on the board of both the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies and continues to live with his family on a ranch in Montana, actively engaged in saving the American wilderness.

Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short essays on The Yaak. Interesting, if you are a Yaak enthusiast. If not, just another nature read.

[Laura]

I picked up this book in preparation for my trip to Montana this summer, expecting that it would feed my excitement. I hoped for stories about the glory and terror of the trees and rivers and animals, about how overwhelming and real and beautiful it felt to be in this unique space. By chapter four I had read exactly one story that conjured the beauty and specialness of the Yaak Valley. Everything else, including the Introduction and the Prologue, were depressing chronicles of how the government has no intention of protecting this area from the corporations who destroy it.

My conclusion is that this book is aimed at consciousness-raising, although frankly that seems like preaching to the choir since anyone who needs to be told to protect the wilderness will not pick up this book in the first place.