In the heart of Australia's rugged high country, three generations of the MacLeod family battle to make a living on the land. As a young married couple, Andrew and Anne work together to make the very best of their property, High Peaks, but at what cost to their happiness? In time, the property will pass to their son, David. Handsome and hardwork...
Return to Moondilla tells the story of former journalist, Greg Baxter, who's recently returned to the Moondilla area he grew up in to finish writing what he hopes will be a bestselling novel. Far from being able to concentrate on his novel, though, Baxter is drawn into an investigation into a local drug dealing ring that puts his life in danger. He's also the subject of attention of numerous single women in Moondilla, including the local doctor he once had a crush on, Julie Rankin. After an attempt on his life, Baxter is hugely relieved when the drug ring is broken open. Finally able to finish his novel, he's elated by its success and also finds himself in love. With Return to Moondilla, popular Australian author, Tony Parsons, has written another action-packed novel combining a rural setting with a crime subplot and some romance.
Winner of the 2020 Reading the West Advocacy Award Winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction "This is a book for all of us, right now." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect. In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief… to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”
It's fall in the Sierra Mountains, and Anna Pigeon is slinging hash in Yosemite National Park's historic Ahwahnee Hotel. Four young people, all seasonal park employees, have disappeared, and two weeks of work by crack search-and-rescue teams have failed to turn up a single clue; investigators are unsure as to whether the four went AWOL for reasons of their own - or died in the park. Needing an out-of-park ranger to work undercover, Anna is detailed to dining room duty; but after a week of waiting tables, she knows the missing employees are only the first indication of a sickness threatening the park. Her twenty-something roommates give up their party-girl ways and panic; her new restaurant colleagues regard her with suspicion and fear. Yet when Anna's life if threatened and her temporary supervisor turns a deaf ear, she follows the scent of evil, taking a solo hike up a snowy trial to the high country, seeking answers. What awaits her is a nightmare of death and greed - and perhaps her final adventure.
The packer’s business is guiding mule trains into mountains where wagons can’t travel. It’s a life of danger, long days, and low pay. But for those wedded to the wilderness and inaccessible high country, it is the only life there is. During the Great Depression, young Ty Hardin is sent from his family’s failing Montana ranch to learn from the last of the great packers, Fenton Pardee, legendary in the Montana Rockies for his packing adventures across the Swan Range all the way to the Big Divide. High Country follows Ty through this apprenticeship and into World War II, where he watches trucks and jeeps replace the army’s mules. Wounded and shipped home, Ty recovers by packing into the Montana mountains he loves. After his mentor dies, Ty leaves Montana for the Sierra Nevada—the highest country of all—where he becomes a legend in his own right. Writing in the tradition of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It, Willard Wyman shares techniques of breaking and packing and leading animals into forbidding country, hunting and tracking, and making camp. Wyman brings you so close to the packer’s life you smell the leather, sweat, and oil.
He was a hard-edged rancher harboring dark secrets But Baylor McCullough wasn't talking, especially not to Mariah Ellis, the pushy but beautiful detective who considered him the prime suspect in a recent disappearance. A series of shocking murders and attacks revealed, however, that nothing was as it seemed—not even the past—and saddling up with Mariah might be his best chance at uncovering the truth. Still, protecting her while they searched for clues on his ranch was becoming increasingly difficult as the threats escalated. And the thought of Mariah getting caught in the cross fire didn't sit well with the rugged cowboy. Was it possible the beauty he'd rescued during a raging blizzard was the long-sought redemption he'd been hoping for?
Micala Brogan is a traveler in the foster home system, but no matter where she goes, her dreams remain the same. She loves horses, and she loves racing. She comes to Colorado with grand dreams and little else. She is temporarily placed with a high country rancher who knows about life's uncertain events. Would this open her dreams, or shatter them? She wrestles with ridicule from classmates and encounters agonizing moments. She will discover that the path to her dreams may have too many obstacles. Could her love for a black stallion help her make the journey?
Fraught with adventure and peril, hope and disillusionment; cruelty, violence, and the persistence of boyish love, Kit Cope Rides the High Country is a story of two worlds at an end and the last stubborn holdouts on both sides who must meet for a final epic clash in an unseasonable echo of a former age.
In the 1930s, iconic American author Ernest Hemingway spent five summers at a ranch on the edge of Yellowstone National Park. Here he did some of his best writing, and his experiences in the mountains are connected to twelve of his most famous works, including For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway declared that the ranch near the small, wilderness town of Cooke City, Montana, on the edge of Yellowstone, was one of his favorite places to write in the world, on par with Paris and Madrid. Yet Hemingway’s time in the Yellowstone High Country has never been thoroughly examined—until now. After years of painstaking research, author Chris Warren takes readers on an astonishing journey into one of the most important periods in the life of one of the world’s most important writers. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Hemingway was at his best—as a man, father, and writer—when he was in the Yellowstone High Country, and in this fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable book, Warren examines what Hemingway did here, what he wrote here, and how his experiences and the people he met here shaped his life and work. This is a Hemingway that few readers knew existed, living in a place that few scholars knew was so essential to his writing. Author Chris Warren, a resident of Cooke City, Montana, has spent years researching Hemingway’s connection to the area. In 2018 he presented a paper on Hemingway’s final short story, which was set in Cooke City, to the Hemingway Society in Paris, France. Warren’s research was instrumental in bringing the society’s biennial conference to Cooke City, Montana, and Sheridan, Wyoming, in 2020.
Popular hunting/fishing personalities Jason Cruise and Jimmy Sites, also pastors, take outdoor enthusiasts deeper into God’s Word with this rugged devotional that draws comparisons between hunting seasons and the spiritual seasons of the soul. Into the High Country includes truth-revealing stories of adventure and space for writing down one’s own thoughts and experiences.