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

by Rick Bass (Editor)

Book by

Genres: Nonfiction

248 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.